Cultural/social factors — Edexcel A-Level Business
Test yourself on Cultural/social factors with PEARSON EDEXCEL A-Level practice questions.
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Cultural/social factors explained
Before a product crosses a border somebody has to check what the name means, what the picture shows and whether the recipe suits local diets, because getting it wrong costs a withdrawn campaign and a damaged brand rather than a small sum.
Read the full explanation
The practical controls are back translation of copy, briefing a local agency instead of head office copywriters, and testing packaging colours and imagery with local consumers first. HSBC spent roughly ten million dollars rebranding in 2009 after its Assume Nothing line was rendered as Do Nothing in several markets, and Tesco withdrew from the United States in 2013 having misread how Americans shop. The judgement is normally about control: local autonomy catches these errors but fragments the brand, while central control keeps consistency and misses the local meaning.
Your focus
- a) Considerations for businesses: cultural differences; different tastes; language; unintended meanings; inappropriate/inaccurate translations; inappropriate branding and promotion
Cultural/social factors exam tips
Marking Points
- Naming a specific risk and its specific consequence, for example that a mistranslated slogan forces a campaign to be pulled and a launch to be delayed.
- Recommending a workable control such as back translation, local market research or a local agency, and saying what it costs and who decides.
- Separating an avoidable slip, a bad translation, from a structural difference in taste or religion that requires the product itself to change.
- Weighing the risk against the size of the prize, since a large market may justify full localisation where a small one does not.
Examiner Tips
- 💡These considerations are the strongest counter-argument in an evaluation of overseas expansion, so hold one for the judgement.
- 💡Questions are usually assess or evaluate on a named firm, so give one developed cultural point with a consequence rather than five risks in a list.
- 💡Use the country detail the extract provides, because a generic list of risks is capped on application.
Common Mistakes
- Retelling a famous marketing blunder as an anecdote with no link back to the business in the extract.
- Treating language as the whole problem when diet, religion, gift customs and rules on advertising to children matter just as much.
- Claiming social media makes mistakes cheap to fix, when it mainly makes them faster to spread.