International Journal of Marketing and Business Communication

Purva Kansal ¹

Affiliations
1 University Business School, Chandigarh, Punjab, IN

Abstract

Internet has become a hybrid means of sales, service, and communication channel. Its penetration and acceptability in areas of e-commerce across cultures have given it a growth rate of 566 percent in the time period 2000-2012. Internet helps a marketer to reach target customers across cultures and borders. Therefore, the Internet or its usability in a business environment could not avoid the continuous debate of standardisation versus localisation. This debate revolves around the argument that people live within a traditional core cultures and that these cultures affect communication messages and people's perceptions toward those messages. Therefore, a globally designed website might reduce the cultural acceptability of a website. Practically, more than often the globalisation of content might reduce a company's target audience to a much smaller group in terms of its way of life, customs and religious beliefs.

Literature indicates that another significant element in making mebsites effective is to realise the importance of content and its understanding the users. One of the important issue is the relationship between culture and "feature and content" of a corporate website. Evidence from the emerging body of literature on the cultural dimensions of website design and content attributes cuts both ways on the assumption of culturally-neutral, web-based communication. The present study was undertaken with an objective to examine cultural differences and similarities between the content of existing corporate websites from the three countries i.e. India, China, and Denmark, across Hofstede Cultural Dimensions.

Websites of 24 companies from each host country were analysed. The results of the study were more supportive of localisation of content.

Keywords

Content Analysis, Glocalisation, Culture, International Marketing.

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Purva Kansal ¹

Affiliations
1 University Business School, Panjab University, Chandigarh, IN

Abstract

Recent success of companies like ITC, Hindustan Lever, Godrej etc. have prompted companies to think of an earlier neglected market referred to as the market at the “bottom of the pyramid”. The market has unique characteristics and the strategies of the upper markets don’t usually work in this category or segment. The size of the market and the lower transaction cost of banking transactions have prompted banks to think of entering this segment with mobile banking as a distribution channel for banking services. The factors affecting rejection or acceptance of mobile banking have piqued interest among researchers and remain unknown due in part to consumers’ trust, cost and risk perceptions associated with this new platform. This study extends this line of research by conjointly examining dimensions of cost, trust, and risk in mobile banking with perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness as mediating variables of the relationship. Results of this study indicate that though perceived cost and perceived risk both had negative relationship with perceived ease of use yet the trust dimension had strongest influence on actual usage for this segment. The results indicate that in order to gain penetration in this segment companies need to pursue strategies to gain trust of the customers in this segment.

Keywords

Mobile Banking, Bottom of Pyramid, Technology Acceptance Model, Consumer Behaviour.

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