A Study From Cultural Perspective On Mobile Phone Manufacturers' Marketing Strategies In China

The fact that China has become the biggest and most lucrative market in the world, together with her accession into WTO, attracted most world top 500 enterprises of the world to build plants or agents here. They provide job opportunities for Chinese and tax for governments. At the same time, they brought fierce competition to domestic enterprises. How to survive and furthermore get stronger is an urgent task facing with the Chinese enterprises. In recent years, some Chinese enterprises such as Xinfei, Changhong and TCL etc, stand the competition and some, like Haier and Changhong, even have entered international market successfully. Conducting studies on these enterprises will be helpful to other Chinese enterprises. Considering that mobile phone is one of the fastest developing industries in China, the dissertation chooses it as its research subject. The domestic enterprises entered the field in 1999 and only by 5 years their market shares have surpassed 50%. Among these domestic manufacturers, Bird and TCL take the lion's share all the time. TCL and Bird both owe their success to their successful marketing strategies. Conducting study on their marketing strategies can not only inform us the status quo of domestic marketing strategies, find their merits and shortcomings, but also provide references to other industries. The former researches in this area are mainly from the point of view of pure marketing. But this cannot explain the failure of the foreign brands armed with advanced technologies and marketing theories. The dissertation tries to study the marketing strategies of domestic and foreign mobile phone manufacturers from the perspective of culture with the method of case study. The study indicates that domestic brands built closer relationships with dealers and customers by innovating channels and promotion strategies than foreign brands; mobile phones designed by domestic brands met the aesthetics of Chinese people better than foreign brands; the products design of domestic brands considered the change of women's role in China; the products of domestic mobile phone manufacturers took the face of Chinese consumers into consideration. Despite the large market share,domestic mobile phone manufacturers still face many difficulties. They need to go on taking deeper insights into the culture and develop more reasonable marketing strategies to regain their advantages. One implication from the current study is that when competing in the international market, mobile phone manufacturers should take cultural elements into consideration when they design and implement the marketing strategies. Only by this way can they gain their marketing aims.