| The tremendous growth of worldwide e-commerce, has led to a critical mass of corporations participating in a global online marketplace. In order to attract and retain more customers, it is vital for companies to localize their website messages and adapt those versions to the local markets they target. To be most effective in communicating with a target audience via the Web, multinationals must not only realize the significance of adapting their websites for customers and other publics in different countries but must also know how to make these adaptations. However, despite the increasing importance of marketing communication on the websites, little effort has been made to shed light on the role of culture in how multinational corporations create websites for home-country and host-country markets.To address this deficit in literature and to provide international marketers and Web designers with insights into website localization, a modified framework of cultural values based on Hofstede's (1980) four cultural dimensions and Hall's (1976) context dimension was applied in this study to evaluate the degree of cultural adaptation of the selected companies'websites. Forty U.S.-based Fortune 500 companies are surveyed to investigate the cultural adaptation of their Chinese websites. Content analysis of the 80 U.S. domestic and Chinese websites reveals that local website messages not only reflect cultural values of the country of their origin, but also seem to differsignificantly from each other on cultural dimensions, cultural awareness is a critical factor in communication and must be taken into account if the website is to be an effective vehicle for communication and a marketing strategy in a cross-cultural context. This study explores how we might accomplish the localization of messages on websites more effectively by providing cultural dimension approaches and brings some enlightenment to Chinese enterprises who intend to expand business both at home and abroad. |
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