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A pragmatic approach to the analysis of marketing adaptation to Russian national culture
There are a great number of transnational corporations operating all over the world. All of themare facing the issue of national culture, and cross-cultural difference is of vital importance.Choosing appropriate marketing strategy assures success or failure on the international market.The concept of culture is very dynamic and requires constant observation. The tasks marketingmanagers started to deal with became more complex, requiring cultural sensitivity and abilityto overcome cross-cultural differences.The research, presented in this paper, attempts to analyze whether national culture affectsmarketing strategy of international companies. The framework of cultural dimensionsdeveloped by Hofstede was taken as a basis for the analysis of Russian national culture. Theauthor resorts to the quantitative approach based on the conducted survey and analyzes datacollected in the Russian Federation. At first cultural values were used to identify Russia.Cultural values were measured at the individual level and compared to the previous findings onRussian culture. Analysis of differences in cultural values on the individual level amongRussian population has shown that there is some kind of difference between previous findingsrelated to Russia and findings obtained during the research. The level of adaptation wasevaluated from the consumers’ point of view. Questionnaire was designed based on theanalyzed literature, and obtained data was statistically analyzed with SPSS. Linear regressionand correlation analysis were used to prove the hypotheses of the research work. ThoughRussian national culture was depicted as unique with a great number of peculiarities, in theindustries, analyzed in this paper, the connection between marketing strategy adaptation anduncertainty avoidance, and marketing strategy adaptation and dimension of collectivism for fastmoving consumer goods was proved statistically.The second stage of the research included the analysis of the empirical evidence of the culturaladaptation of the advertisement of fast moving consumer goods for the Russian consumer. Anumber of samples were analyzed, and two cases are presented in the paper. The pragmaticapproach was used for the analysis of the empirical data.The results of the study add to the theoretical knowledge about the relationship between culturaldimensions in Russia and marketing strategies employed by transnational companies. They alsocontribute to the knowledge about Russian consumers’ behavior patterns. The framework canbe potentially applied to other spheres of professional business in Russia.