Culture Plays a Silent Role in a Business

Culture is defined as "complex construct that embodies a people's knowledge, morals, art, beliefs, customs, laws and other capabilities gathered by a community over time" (Clifton, 2004).

There are various challenges doing business on international platform. One of the challenges is Culture. Due to globalization and multinational companies being established on different nations, it has been the crucial that we need to have better understanding of the culture associated with the dealing stakeholders.

'Keegan' has summarized the importance of studying cultural environment for a International Marketer. According to him, "The task of the global marketers is twofold. Marketers must be prepared to recognize and understand the differences between cultures and then incorporate this understanding into the marketing planning process so that appropriate strategies and marketing programmes are adopted."

There are different cultural variations when two international parties negotiate or deal. Some of them are as follows:-

1. Contract or relationship:- North Americans are contract deal maker whereas the Asians negotiate creating the relationship. Hence, it is very important that you should know your strategy whether to convince or persuade the other party with the rewards over the long term, which may be a waste of time and energy or to deliver a low-cost contract.

2. Win -Lose or Win - Win :-

It is very important factor to identify the negotiator in front of you whether he is collaborative or biased. Especially the Japanese are found to exhibit the win-win process whereas most of Spanish would love to exhibit the Win-Lose situation

3. Personality : Informal / Formal:-

Dealing with various culture personalities may reveal that culture strongly influences the personality style. Germans have a more formal style than Americans. Similarly, for an American, calling someone by the first name is an act of friendship and hence a good thing but for a Japanese, the use of first name is an act of disrespect and therefore bad.

4. Communication : Direct / Indirect:-

Different cultures follow different types of communication system. Some of them emphasize direct and simple method of communication whereas some rely heavily on indirect and complex methods. For example, American or the Israeli express a clear and definite response to the query whereas Japanese have the culture of indirectness with impatience, of not saying what they meant.

5. Sensitivity