The Culturally Customized Web Site

177 Pages·2011·10.124 MB·English

by  Singh, Nitish;Pereira, Arun

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THE CULTURALLY
CUSTOMIZED WEB SITE
Customizing Web Sites for the
Global Marketplace
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THE CULTURALLY
CUSTOMIZED
WEB SITE
Customizing Web Sites for the
Global Marketplace
Nitish Singh,Ph.D.
California State University,Chico
Arun Pereira,Ph.D.
Saint Louis University
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Elsevier Butterworth–Heinemann
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ISBN:0-7506-7849-6
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Printed in the United States ofAmerica
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For adoptive families the world over,in appreciation;
for Kavita and Meera,with love.
-AP
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CONTENTS
Preface ix
Foreword xi
1. Culture: The New Imperative in Web Design 1
2. The Rationale for Cultural Customization 23
3. A Cultural Values Framework for
Web Design 53
4. Cultural Customization:
Individualism-Collectivism 71
5. Cultural Customization:
Uncertainty Avoidance 93
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CONTENTS
6. Cultural Customization:
Power Distance 111
7. Cultural Customization:
Masculinity-Femininity 125
8. Cultural Customization:
High-Low Context 139
9. Cultural Customization:
The Future is Here 151
Index 161
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PREFACE
This book is the result of over four years of research on various aspects of
e-commerce, culture, and online consumer behavior. The Internet, with
its unparalleled access to global customers and the potential for highly-
customized marketing,has brought with it both promise and peril for inter-
national marketers. The promise of being “born global” with access to
far-flung customers at unprecedented low costs must be tempered with the
need for extraordinary business savvy to effectively confront the complexity
of international competition and pressure on profit margins.How a global
marketer manages the access to a vast,multicultural customer base,and han-
dles other competitors vying for these customers will determine if it succeeds
in the marketplace.
A key issue in the quest for global success through the Internet is the
ability to design a web site that draws targeted customers, generates the
desired behavior (be it a purchase or otherwise), builds trust and loyalty
with these customers,and is invulnerable to competitive marketing actions.
The process for this will obviously vary,depending on the needs of the tar-
geted customers—and customers in the global marketplace are of every cul-
tural stripe possible,making for a multicultural sea of differing tastes and
needs. In this context, where does one start to design web sites that are
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