Cultural Influences on Consumer Goods Marketing in China

Master's Thesis from the year 2015 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 1,0, TU Bergakademie Freiberg (Professur für Englische Fachsprache der Wirtschaftswissenschaften und technischen Wissenschaften), language: English, abstract: In recent years, China has witnessed the most skyrocketing economic growth in history. For Germany, China has become the third most important trading partner. Especially for German key industries like the automotive branch and mechanical engineering, the Chinese market has become vitally important. The shift from a seller¿s market to a buyer¿s market in China with an excess of supply over demand is accompanied by extreme competition between countless suppliers, which forces competing companies to implement efficient and effective marketing strategies in order to acquire customers. Cultural factors in China and Germany differ so much that they affect the entire success of business. They act as invisible barriers that must be overcome, not only in order to build competitive advantages, but in order to be competitive at all. When entering the Chinese market, foreign firms must consider that they will operate in a completely different culture, in which perception, communication, norms, values and other aspects cannot be compared to their respective German counterparts. As this thesis will show, many foreign firms fail in the Chinese market due to their inadequate altercation with cultural specifics, an unwillingness to adapt their strategy to the cultural environment, or a product-market mismatch based on cultural dissimilarities.
In order to implement marketing strategies flexibly and effectively in a completely different environment for a completely different target clientele, it is indispensable for German marketers to learn about Chinese culture mindfully.
Therefore, the main objective of this work is to prepare German marketing professionals for conducting marketing activities in the Chinese market by demonstrating the impact of culture on marketing, making German marketers more familiar with Chinese culture, and by providing useful advice for their marketing strategies.