Ethos, Pathos, and Logos of Doing Business Abroad: Geert Hofstede’s Five Dimensions of National Culture on Transcultural Marketing

Marketing, Advertising, And Global Branding

The study of culture to understand global advertising results from the global-local dilemma: whether to standardize advertising for efficiency reasons or to adapt to local habits and consumer motives to be effective. Only recently have studies included performance criteria and several studies have demonstrated that an adaptation strategy is more effective (Calantone, Kim, Schmidt, & Cavusgil, 2006; Dow, 2005; Okazaki, Taylor, & Zou, 2006; Wong & Merrilees, 2007). As a result, understanding culture will be viewed as increasingly important. In the past decades various models have emerged of which the Hofstede model has been applied to global marketing and advertising the most. Geert Hofstede’s dimensional model of national culture has been applied to various areas of global branding and advertising and the underlying theories of consumer behavior. The model has been used to explain differences of the concepts of self, personality and identity, which in turn explains variations in branding strategy and communications.