Analysis of Cultural Differences and their Effects on Marketing Products in the United States of America and Germany with a Focus on Cultural Theories of Hall and Hofstede

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing grade: 1.7 University of Applied Sciences Essen course: Analysis of Cultural Differences and their Effects on Marketing Products in the United States of America and Germany with a Focus on Cultural Theories of Hall and Hofstede language: English abstract: This thesis aims at analysing cultural differences and their effect on marketing products internationally. The United States of America and Germany are used to exemplify this issue. Todays science provides numerous approaches to making cultural differences visible and tangible. All of these solutions and dimensions give companies and people in general a guide to becoming aware of and understand differences and how to cope with them appropriately. Trompenaars a famous consultant for intercultural communication uses the allegory of a fish and its habitat water to explain the characteristics of culture: A fish only discovers its need for water when it is no longer in it.2 Accordingly culture can be seen as the substance that surrounds a human being and makes him unable to distinguish between different and normal. Therefore this thesis uses the cultural theories of Edward T. Hall and Geert Hofstede who both developed approaches to cultural differences by using either a four- or five-dimensions model. These cultural dimensions will be applied to the special circumstances and conditions which a marketer has to deal with in the United States and Germany and thus draws connections between those two different fields of science. As already mentioned in section 1.1 cultural differences play an important role in todays international marketing. It is therefore important to examine if and how cultural differences according to Hall and Hofstede affect parts of the marketing mix for companies selling products in the United States as well as in Germany. The following questions can help to identify the n