Discuss about the Hofstede Cultural Framework and Advertising Research.
This study is based on an understanding of effective business communication in reference to the case study organization. The case study organization has been highlighted in this study as struggling to maintain an effective communication within and outside of the organization. The topic is chosen because communication is of utmost value in business and is a solution to many issues that could arise, if there is an absence of the effective practices of communication. The case study organization is an Australian based multinational company that is specialized in manufacturing or preparing the agricultural equipments. Their customers are in both domestic and the international markets. Some of its international markets include India, Vietnam, Nigeria and Oman. The overall number of employees comprising of both domestic and international business branches is equal to 8,000 as stated in the given case study. The number of customers is close to 1 million. However, in recent times the company seemed to have struggled to maintain the effective communication practices at the variety of channels with the types of stakeholders. The business has struggled to correlate its activities with customers on the types of media sites like blogs, wikis, and social networks. This has hampered the sharing of knowledge, effective management of knowledge base and so. The communication had hampered to the extent that it also failed to receive the feedback of clients on the quality of service and any further improvement. The interrelationship between the internal stakeholders had also suffered due to the ineffective practices of intercultural communication. It has created an environment where organization people have lost the trust and also misunderstand each other.
It is quite evident from above discussion that the report is purposefully aimed at describing the severity of ineffective business communication and also recommending a few of solutions to the case study company to enable it to overcome the identified issue.
The report is strictly confined to understand the significance of effective business communication with the help of valuable articles. The study is in the reference of the case study company. It covers the three different problems which are the consequences of one identified issue the ineffective business communication. The three issues are as follows:
Hence, the report is strictly limited just to the highlighted three issues as above.
The probable outcomes of the report are the level of severity that an ineffective use of business communication can cause to an organization and also the relevant solutions to mitigate the issues.
The report consists of the details on the identified issue in the context of the case study company. It constructs a literature review section to establish an understanding regarding the level of severity of using an ineffective business communication. It also put forward some necessary countering solution to the issues in the form of recommendations.
Social media sites are now a very good resource to be in constant communication with a wider audience who may or may not be the customers. This is also a very good resource to share some important happenings, so that, customers are informed on the activities. This helps to deepen the bonding of trust between customers and the employers. The trust deepens because customer feels valued by knowing that employers are in constant concern for their audience. If contents are valuable and profitable also from the customer’s perspectives, they will have positive perceptions for employers. The level of trust increases and also the chances of misunderstanding get diminished (Jin, Liu & Austin, 2014). This is exactly what the problem is with the case study organization. The case company has an ineffective presence on the social media sites and it is also troublesome for the business profitability that can be understood when looked on the benefits of being active on the social media sites. The benefits of effective communication on the social media sites are as listed the below:
Brand Awareness: Social networking will uncover the organization or administration to new eyes. With just a single tick the message is appeared to the huge number of individuals. Online networking can enable the company to discover customers. It can discover customers and help to reach to much more individuals. This means that brand awareness is created and thousands of customers using the product but not aware of the brand initially, gets to know the brand (Hassan, Nadzim & Shiratuddin, 2015). The satisfied customers get to know the brand which provides them the quality product or service. The trust which customers already had on product or service gets converted into brand recognition. The business without social media usage may not have provided the platform which the social media creates. The number of audience that social media helps to reach to, is not realistic, if communication on social media sites is not effective (Cornelissen & Cornelissen, 2017).
Know the target audience: Social media gives a bit of knowledge into what the gathering of people does the employer has. Becoming more acquainted with the gathering of people that one have, can enable to find innovative approaches to contact them through promoting or substance. Catering and focusing to this degree will prompt expanded conversions (Cardon & Marshall, 2015). This means the social media sites are a good resource to know or identify the audience. The concept which the social sites follow is very much similar to interacting to customers by physical meets. In the physical meets, customers exchange their views on the products or services which may be either positive or negative. Few of them are also indulged in open discussion for quite a second. Social media sites do provide the very similar concept but, differs in its way of interaction with customers. The business just requires an exchange of words through social media sites. Moreover, it generates a number of important comments which are valuable irrespective of the types of comments. If comments are negative, the requirement for ‘need analysis’ will be created. This means finding the areas for improvement (Ellison et al., 2014). Hence, an exchange of communication between employers and the audience generates valuable facts that are difficult to analyze without it. Such data will also help in reaching to a wider audience with much better product features and the service quality (Agnihotri et al., 2016).
Relevant offers: Effective communication with customers on the social media sites generates valuable data as well. Such data can be used to analyze the strong areas or the areas to improve. Moreover, it generates the valuable data which employers can use to make few changes to the existing products and also bringing the relevant products in future (Law, Buhalis & Cobanoglu, 2014). For example, customers have complained of poor camera quality from a Smartphone brand. Few of the customers may also have mentioned about where the phone has gone wrong. Such comments if genuine can be utilized to consider in future products. Hence, customer will also understand that their complaints are being taken care seriously. Such thing can help in building up a brand image provided, that the escalated facts are removed from the product (Paniagua & Sapena, 2014).
New opportunities: Social media sites as stated earlier are a good resource to interacting to customers. Such interaction helps to know a bit of the customer views on a particular product or service. If a product or a service receives the negative views this actually creates the opportunities for employers. Employers get to know the areas which the customers have disliked. Such information or data could not have been attained if social interactions were not there (Chaudhri, 2016). The negative comments can be resolved in future by working on it effectively. However, to get such data from the different corners of world is impossible without the utilization of social sites. The modern day business depends a lot on data as it helps to construct the strategies. This is why employers give honest attention to getting data from reliable resource, so that, competency level is increased (Öztamur & Karakad?lar, 2014).
Customer service: The discussions that have been covered so far do establish a few facts like social interaction with customers produce the valuable data. Such data can be used for future reference for bringing the necessary amendments in the products. The data can also be used to improve the marketing activities by making it much more realistic. Nonetheless, customers trust on advertisements that appears realistic to customers (Ashley & Tuten, 2015).
Feedback is very important to maintain a learning organizational progress and to remain competitive (Dijkmans, Kerkhof & Beukeboom, 2015). It is quite easier to get the feedback from employees in one single branch of the company; however, it is bit challenging to get it from every single branch. It is even more challenging to get the feedback from customers. The social media sites do not just allow getting the feedback from customers but, also the wider audience that may not be the consumers of a particular product or service. Hence, it provides the opportunities where customers and the audience can actually engage with their chosen brand and exchange a few of views (Leung, Bai & Stahura, 2015). Customer can share their delights or the frustration for a product. Employers can involve in further communication to know in details the actual issue. In this way, useful data is generated which is of huge importance for a sustainable business practice/
Feedback is one of the most necessary steps to complete communication, on the other hand communication is very important to establish a proper business practice that would be successful in making proper consumer engagement. Communication in itself is a dynamic process which should be two way in order to make the communication process complete (Park, Wilding & Chung, 2014). Apart from that the communication process must be measurable according to its effectiveness. The measuring of communication process will happen when there is feedback from the side of the listener of the communication. In business it is necessary for a company to measure the effectiveness of the communication to understand whether the communication strategy that is followed is bringing proper return on investment or not. Feedback also helps in understanding the view of the customers and hence giving better understanding of the needs and requirements of the market. The message can be transmitted using various media. It is important to decide what media is to be used in a particular circumstance in order to make the message go through. Improper media is not effective as the audience reach is not proper (Baker et al., 2013). A business has a target audience who are its potential customers and the media used must be reaching the target audience in order to be effective. Feedback is the process of not only sending the information across but also receiving important information that is constructive for the business. This will make the base on which the business is constructed. Customer feedback helps the company to formulate business policies based on market demand.
According to Ordenes et al. (2014) the measuring of customer feedback is a challenging job. The customer feedbacks collected through various mediums are causing too much complexities because of the presence of voluminous textual data. The authors have expressed that that text mining is effective in solving such problem and searching for meaning in the hugfe textual feedback data that is received from various sources. Radojevic, Stanisic & Stanic (2015) has stated that in case of the hospitality industry customer feedback has emphatically stated that the positive effects on customer feedback depends on the services given by the hospitality organization. Therefore customer feedback and service is dependent on each other and vice versa. Better service increases the positive customer feed and positive customer feedback increases the service quality when the organization brings changes according to the customer feedback. For business policy formulators it is important to understand what is the need of the customers and how do they want to receive service. Oelke et al, (2009) has given a clear picture about how to put customer feedback into perspective and visualize the same in a meaningful pattern. There are techniques to understand the viability of feedback and how it gives rise to positive feeling among the customers. In this case the company might use such techniques from professional resources that will give rise to the better management of customer feedback and will help in producing more business. Sashi, (2012) has given a model through which customer engagement and retention is possible through the process of “connection, interaction, satisfaction, retention, loyalty, advocacy, and engagement as stages in the cycle”.
Various regions of the world are more connected than ever before in today’s times. This has mainly happened due to the technological revolution in the field of communication and transportation. The concept of global village thus evolved stating the idea, that though the world is separated by huge distances, but technology has brought everyone closer like that in a single village (Piller, 2017). . In large companies across the world there are people from all around the globe working together. The cultural differences sometimes give rise to complications within the companies as the understanding about various management issues is different across culture (Samovar et al., 2014). This can be understood by analyzing the Hofstede model (Saleem & Larimo, 2017). Teams of different people having different language backgrounds, religious beliefs, values, customs, working habits, and lifestyle work together in the same workplace, this is bound to create some differences. However if intercultural communication be established properly among the employees and with the customers, there is a vast potential of tapping business from areas which are not explored as of yet by the company (House, 2014). The corporate diversity policies and programs has been implemented by the companies keeping the potential of diversity as the focus. Intercultural communication not only takes place within the organization but it also takes place beyond the organization, with the customers or vendors (Sorrells, 2015).
The big organizations have presence in a number of countries including those which are culturally diverse than the home country of the company. This creates the need for the company to adopt the culture of the host country. Otherwise it would be difficult for the company to successfully run business in the new scenario. Apple Inc. has its headquarters in USA, the source of its parts and peripherals is from China, and its stores and offices are present in all the major countries of the world. Therefore the company requires to maintain great intercultural communication both within the company and beyond the company. These companies have to maintain a culturally diversified employee base in order to understand the need of the diversified customer base all over the world. Any company must adopt to the indigenous culture of a country in order to cater to the need of the customer in that particular region.
According to Chen (2012) development of new media is one of the main reasons behind the growth of globalization and intercultural communication. This is the reason that many new scholars are now involved in the process of investigating relationship between intercultural communication and new media. The areas where investigation is carried on in this regard are “(1) the impact of national/ethnic culture on the development of new media, (2) the impact of new media on cultural/social identity, and (3) the impact of new media (especially social media) on different aspects of intercultural communication (e.g., intercultural relationships, intercultural adaptation, and intercultural conflict)” (Chen, 2012). According to Hua, (2013) cultural identity is a very complex term to understand and define. It has various layers to- understand and the meaning has multiple implications in this regard. Therefore the human resource of a company is a very complicated system. Establishing effective intercultural communication would automatically help the company in utilizing the best from its employees in terms of cultural innovation. According to Washington, Okoro & Thomas, (2012) the countries across the globe are becoming interdependent on each other in terms of business and financial activities. Therefore it is the need of the hour to establish a better understanding among the countries about each other’s culture in terms of financial and non-financial aspects. The globalized world is a playground for the business entities to play and utilize the effects of globalization to the fullest. “Therefore, businesses from different countries need to appreciate the importance of understanding the cultures and values of their counterparts as well as develop intercultural communication sensitivity and decorum.” (Okoro & Thomas, 2012). Intercultural communication policy should be separately formulated in order to keep it clear how any challenges on the way can be dealt. There are challenges like personal discrimination and bias among the employees, less knowledge about culture of each other and ignorance of establishing intercultural communication from employee’s side. These challenges must be dealt with in order to establish effective intercultural communication.
Conclusion:
Therefore it can be concluded that effective communication is very important for a business to successfully incur revenue and give the much needed stability to the business. Business communication has several categories to look into, three very important of which are social media communication, feedback from the consumers, and intercultural communication. As it can be understood well from the above discussion that social media is the most important tool in today’s digital world to expand and publicize the business. All kinds of target customers are users of social media hence it is necessary to reach these people. Secondly from social media and other platforms it is necessary to retrieve feedback so that the needs and views of the customers can be understood in real-time. Without customer feedback it is not possible for a company to understand where it is going wrong and what changes are necessary. The last important aspect of business communication is intercultural communication among various members and stakeholders of the company. This may include the customers or the employees of the organization. The company in question must take into consideration all these aspects about business communication and establish a better business. The countries in which the company operates are culturally diverse hence the communication must be targeted and customized according to the target country. The recommendations will further provide some insights about bringing the needed changes in the communication strategy of the company and improve its performance.
The company operates in countries like “Australia, Vietnam, India, Oman, and Nigeria”. This makes the target population highly diversified. The target is also the population who are engaged in agricultural activities. In Australia the people who are engaged in agricultural activities use social media in high rate, in India that rate is lower and in Nigeria the lowest. Therefore The Company must formulate a social media strategy that will include the regions where social media usage is high and people related to agriculture often use these sites. The social media campaign can be designed after proper research about the market and social media usage in these countries.
Customer feedback can be received through social media, company website, through the sellers of the equipment’s, and through direct contact means such as phone calls, emails, and letters. Apart from that the company can also use surveys and census to understand the need and requirements of the customers. The feedbacks should be handled by a separate team of people that may be called the customer feedback cell. This will categories the customer requirements in tables and charts and they must be divided according to their importance, the requirements can be solved according to their importance. Feedback must be given the highest priority in customer service.
As mentioned, inter cultural communication is important both in case of customer retention and in employee retention. This company operates in countries which have very diverse population. The faith, customs, traditions, religious beliefs, lifestyle and culture in all these countries are radically different. The company needs to incorporate people from these all areas into its workforce in order to understand the need of the customers in all these regions. The diversified work force will make cultural innovations that will give rise to a business model that will cater to a diverse customer base. There must be a substantial intercultural policy within the company in order to deal with the challenges that the company might face in this regard.
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