Amelia's Marvelous Marketing Blog

Culture is like a dropping an Alka-seltzer into a glass – you don’t see it, but somehow it does something.

-Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Culture – that all elusive quality of a nation, is indeed so invisible that it seldom gets noticed in ordinary day-to-day activities. And yet it affects our world so drastically that marketers have to pay detailed attention to it when they develop their strategies.

Being in a ‘new’ culture (although similar in its Western orientation) has made me aware of the differences in cultural sensitivities and ideas. It has also shown me that it’s often the small things like colour that affect the way we respond to marketing stimuli. One such quirk that shocked me at first was the colour of Cream Soda. In South Africa the colour is violently green, whereas here it is pink! When I did some research online I found out that its flavour is also subtly different- it is meant to have a rose taste (unlike traditional Cream sodas which are meant to taste like vanilla ice-cream). Cream Soda mixed drinks are infamously named “Green Ambulances” by South African students due to the (undoubtedly untrue) belief that Cream Soda assists in hangover recovery.

So now you might be wondering why I care enough to write about ‘pop’ (what we call fizzy drink). It is because colours, along with other images, symbols and numbers do not always translate across cultures. 
In some cultures there are lucky colours, such as red in China and unlucky colours, such as black in Japan. Marketers have to be incredibly vigilant when operating across borders. Take another example of MacDonalds. I’ve seen a number of blue and yellow MacDonald franchises here, whereas in South Africa the bigger, redder and more garish the better. Due to the income disparity between the continents of Africa and North America, adverts in the former tend to focus on different stimuli. Red, marketers have shown, appeals to a lower income bracket, whereas blue I assume might be deemed more ‘tasteful’ by a wealthier nation. Our textbook says that the restaurant chain is spending $828 million on remodelling 1280 European outlets (p194). This is because McDonalds has found that Europeans prefer a “sit-down” experience to a take out one. McDonald’s restaurants are starting to feature cafe lattes, dark leather upholstery and comfortable sitting areas rather than the older unappealing decor.

The marketing world is full of cross-cultural blunders. One that I found hysterical was Ford’s introduction of the ‘Pinto’ in Brazil. After seeing sales fail, the company quickly realized that this was due to the fact that Brazilians did not want to be seen driving a car meaning ‘tiny male genitals’.