Riassunto analitico
This research was conducted to understand if internationalized and cross-culturally aware companies adapt their web-mediated communication, specifically their websites, to the cultures of the different countries where they offer their products and services. In particular, this study focuses on three companies of the automotive industry, BMW, Audi and Volvo, selected through four criteria: product category, size and turnover, international presence and focus on innovations. The object of the analysis are the international, British and Indian websites of the three abovementioned companies, and the following sections were examined for each site: homepage, company, products and electromobility sections. For the purpose of this thesis different studies about cultures were examined like the Hall’s context model and the Hofstede’s cultural dimensions; in addition, some models about the cultural adaptation of websites by Marcus and Gould (2000), by Singh, Zhao and Hu (2003), and Calabrese et al. (2014) were studied and taken into consideration for the analysis in this work. The main results are that some companies adopted a localization strategy adapting their websites (BMW and Audi), while Volvo failed to adjust its foreign websites following a more standardized strategy. These strategies aimed at adapting websites culturally are a way to make the communication activity of the company more efficient, and, as a consequence, to gain a stable competitive advantage in terms of customers’ relationship.
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