Hello! Welcome to the "Intercultural Analysis Platform" segment. Here I will try to do the impossible, which is to explain culture and how to compare it, in just 15 minutes or so. So let's start. So, what is culture? It's like asking, what is life? It's that wide, it's that complex. And without surprise, we have not hundreds, but thousands of definitions. But the one that I like and that is most cited by many, many marketing people, is the definition of Geert Hofstede, who explains culture in the following way: The two keywords that we should write down here are: Programming and Category. And please, try to remember them in the next segments because they carry the essential characteristic of culture. A, it is something that is learned and not innate, and B, concerns a collective response. Therefore, individual behavior may vary. Well, let's think about culture in different ways. We can see culture as an iceberg and it's like an iceberg because we only see the tip, but it that can actually hide much more in the deep. That is the complexity phase of the culture that we can not really understand, the culture that we see is only the one that is on the surface. Also, we have forces around like geological change or like the economy influencing culture. So there is an interaction with other forces in the environment. In marketing culture we have two complementary approaches. Let me repeat it, complementary, Etic and Emic. A common mistake made by many people in marketing is that they assume that one school of thought is better than the other. But other smarter ones use both approaches. One tries to observe a transcultural understanding, free of culture, and at a certain level say that marketing is marketing. The Noon Nopi, of course, is important no matter where you are. But for a better defined setting of Noon Nopi, a much more systematic cultural understanding is needed. So in that sense, in the end, each market is to a certain extent unique. We can see it as if it were a sequence, where we start with the most Etic approach, in which we try to understand from which perspective of universal values consumers respond in a specific region or country. But we will still need a more systematic type of approach or Emic, where we can understand and connect what we see on the surface with the many inherent values of that culture or that country. This is an example. Many countries here in Asia are religious and if they go to Malaysia or Indonesia, they are Islamic and, therefore, they should pray five times a day; what can be inconvenience if you put makeup, and the Etic understanding is that all women aspire to be healthy and beautiful, that is common. But in terms of understanding Emic, we have to be careful with the fact that Islamic women should pray and they should use products that are sensitive to Wudu, which means that they must be conditioned for water, because Wudu requires purifying oneself with water, pure water. If your cosmetics or makeup are not permeable to water, then you must remove them again and again once, five times a day. Then, cosmetics that meet these local religious needs, obviously, have become much more popular. Another useful framework in terms of culture is the context and it was developed by the cultural anthropologist Edward Hall, who lived and studied in many Asian countries like Japan, and he emphasizes in some countries a greater understanding of nuances, what he called as a higher context. So it comes much more to an Emic approach to understanding a culture. In that way, we can understand why the literal definition in some countries it's just that, while in countries with a high context, what people say and what they mean can be very, very different. Even if they are saying yes, and nodding, actually internally they say no, because of the context they want to maintain an image and do not want to be ashamed, and so it is not only limited to language, it may concern space, to the types of contracts required and, obviously, to the time. While in countries of low contexts, time is absolute; in countries of higher contexts, time is much more relative. Here is an interesting example of how the cultural context impacts, even how we use the internet. Research tells us that countries in low contexts, countries like the United States, prefer to use the internet in the following way: with a greater emphasis on more functional information, perhaps using different sites for different things maybe like Facebook for personal things and LinkedIn for business things. While in, in countries of high contexts, countries like Brazil, For example, they will have a greater emphasis on personal relationships, and will tend to be less compartmentalized; maybe they are using Facebook for all their businesses and personal matters, and make a great use of photos. Well, we have learned that culture is something that is acquired through acculturation, is a very long word, isn't it? And that implies that that culture can change depending on the sources of learning, and there may be many sources like those listed here. From a management perspective and even from an academic perspective, we need to understand how these cultural engines are changing. This is just a short list, but those that I have discarded speak about how some of these elements remain relatively the same. Such as perhaps the influence of the school, which has always been very important here in Asia. Also in Latin America, right? Perhaps, the active role that governments have within the country and between countries, such as its soft marketing or soft power or attraction marketing. But in terms of the impact of things like family and friends, not only disconnected, but also online. That is gaining a lot of strength, I think. Excuse me, from the perspective of social networks it is very strong, but from the families it is much weaker. By strong I mean there is a strong tendency of families to become smaller, and therefore, perhaps the influence of families is declining. So in terms of meaning, that's very strong. Let me give you some examples of how companies are adapting to this change in terms of the influence of cultural engines. Maybe you have heard of this company called Xiaomi, from China, although it started in 2010, it is already the largest smartphone seller in China, being on par with companies like Apple and already surpassing Samsung in some cases in China. And they did not have the big budgets that their rivals had. Instead, they relied heavily on social media and events like My Fan, which is some sort of game with the name of their brand. And those are events where they interact with their fans, and sometimes they ask the opinions of their fans and try to implement them as much as they can. So they engage their fans with the feeling that it is a collaborative effort. Well, of course, any talk about culture would be negligent if I do not mention the famous Hofstede Model. I think these dimensions are self-explanatory. And let me emphasize that this is just the beginning, this is much more an Etic approach, where we try to compare and find countries, but let's forget that. Again, culture does not concern individual behavior of each one. But as a starting point for comparison, we can think how the countries of the west and east compare, including the countries of Asia. In this case, Japan, China and South Korea. And we must bear in mind that this is just an example, of course there are many more countries in any region and also here in Asia. Therefore, I recommend that you go to geert-hofstede.com, where you can play with the application and compare different cultures of interest. Let's see what happens here between the three countries. I think the key point here is that you have similarities in things like long-term orientation, to some extent indulgence. But there is a big difference in things like masculinity, that talks about gender roles, and in the prevention of uncertainty, uncertainty avoidance. Therefore, these underlying findings can give you an initial understanding of the common and distinctive features of these countries. Well, in summary, I think we learned in this segment that culture has many layers and that it depends on the layer when we state that a country or countries are similar or different, because even if on the surface they look similar, in their depths they can be very different or vice versa. We also learned that cultural meaning is very context specific, and that culture interacts with other environmental forces. We refer mostly to Asia in this segment, but we can analyze Europe and other regions according to how those forces are changing, to predict what the culture will look like in the future. And finally, we learned through the Hofstede Model that when we compare a culture, we must observe carefully and very specifically the cultural dimension.
