How Individualism-Collectivism Influences Sales Of Mobile Phones in China - Essay Example

The collectivist culture of a target market can be effective for marketing brands with names that are preferred more than the product itself. Consumers who consider other’s opinions to rely on a product can be influenced by the collective marketing strategy such as word of mouth. Whereas, in the individualistic culture, the consumers do not rely on other’s information, rather make choices according to their individual likings. Advertising, packaging, and promotions can be some of the factors that influence a change from collectivist culture to individualism culture such as the quality of a group of people using the product (Ekerete, 2001).

For instance, the culture that the Chinese people follow to a large extent is collectivism and thus prefer to work in groups with due consideration to the team goal rather than their individual objectives (Hofstede, n.d.). This particular notion of the Chinese culture is observed to create a vast impact on their buying behavior which can certainly influence mobile phone selling in the economy. The objective of the proposal will be to provide a brief description of the research process intended to be performed focused on the influence created by individualism and collectivism on the sales of mobile phones in China.

The evaluations will be reviewed through reviewing literature and relate them with the cultural marketing strategy adopted by mobile phone companies of China. 2.0. Literature Review2.1. Individualism and CollectivismAccording to Markus & Kitayama (1991), individualism and collectivism can de differentiated within a group by the independence and interdependence style of working culture. In an individualistic culture, people work as independent targeting their individual goals whereas in a collectivistic culture people are interdependent to each other within the group and aim to fulfill the group’s target ahead of their personal targets.

As observed by Goncalo & Staw (2004), people in individualistic culture often describe themselves as ‘I’ when using any abstract but in the collectivistic culture, people use the abstract of ‘We’ to describe themselves. According to Bond & Smith (1996), a study demonstrated that Asians tend to conform more to their superiors than Americans. Conformity prevails more to the collectivistic culture where people abide by certain guidelines that have been drawn by either the team or their superiors.

However, in an individualistic culture, conformity is often treated as negative and only the organization's guidelines are being followed. As observed by Davidson & et. al. (1976), a person’s behavior is closely linked with the group in a collectivistic culture where the goal of the people should not be regarded as solely independent and different from others, but to encourage the interests of the group. In disparity, the people’s identity in individualistic culture is assumed to be due to the uniqueness of their performances.

Furthermore, according to Kitayama & et. al. (1995), people in the collectivistic culture are not motivated to outperform their group regarding competition among them; instead, they tend to improve their skills in order to contribute to the wellbeing of the group.