Running Head: EVALUATING BRAND INTEGRITY 1
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Running head: EVALUATING BRAND INTEGRITY 1 Evaluating Brand Integrity Through Standardization and Localization in the International Gaming Market Nina Jacobs Northeastern University EVALUATING BRAND INTEGRITY 2 People use brands to communicate. The clothes we wear, the technology we carry, the cars we drive all elevate a first impression for everyone we meet to know who we are and what we believe in. It is impossible to simply purchase a product. Now, consumers must buy into a company: its messages, its executives’ political stances, its corporate responsibility, and its reputation. For a company to rise above the competition, it has to have a coherent and cohesive brand, not only to sell products, but to give its customers an identity. Since the development of the first home console in 1972, the gaming system—or systems —a family owned has been a defining characteristic for many children over the last 5 decades. People take the same pride in being a Nintendo person or a PlayStation person as they do in being an iPhone person or an Android person. In order to remain relevant and pervasive in the industry, gaming manufacturers must present a recognizable brand that consumers can use to tell the world who they are. The United States is Japan’s largest economic partner. Japan and the U.S. are also the two biggest producers of video games and gaming systems, a market that has only recently become a global one. While their economic exchange is essential to their partnership, they are also beginning to encroach on each other’s market. In order to maintain the levels of success they have achieved in their home countries, it is essential for gaming manufacturers to appeal to consumers from other countries, particularly from both the U.S. and Japan. Consumers from everywhere in the world must be able to identify with their preferred company in the same way if they are to be able to identify with each other. According to multiple theories of intercultural communication, the U.S. and Japan are on opposite sides of nearly every dimension of culture. Therefore, it is imperative to understand effective cross-cultural advertising techniques for countries with such disparate ideologies. In EVALUATING BRAND INTEGRITY 3 order to cultivate that understanding, I compiled case studies of Nintendo’s, Microsoft’s, and Sony’s advertising campaigns in the U.S. and Japan, which I supported by conducting a content analysis of a selection of commercials for their game consoles. Literature Review History of Cross-Cultural Communication After World War II, the U.S. occupied territories across the world. However, their diplomatic corps were lacking—less than four percent of Foreign Service officers had any fluency of Japanese or Chinese (Rogers, Hart, & Miike, 2002). The Foreign Service Act, passed in 1946, established the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) as an “in-service, graduate-level training institute for State Department employees and others in the Foreign Service” (“FSI History,” n.d.). The training provided by the FSI included language training and employed the strategy of hiring native speakers as teachers, which promoted an understanding of the importance of cultural comprehension in the process of language instruction. The FSI recruited experts in numerous fields, ranging from linguistics to sociology to cultural anthropology. One of these experts was Dr. Edward T. Hall, who joined the FSI in 1951 (Rogers et al., 2002). Among other achievements, Hall is credited with conceptualizing the field of intercultural communication. Unlike other cultural anthropologists, who generally studied single cultures at the macro-level, Hall focused his investigations on micro-level behaviors and interactions between people of different cultures (Rogers et al., 2002). He brought this approach to the Foreign Service when trainees complained about learning anthropology through a traditional curriculum. A conceptual education using case studies of specific cultures had no practical value for them—they felt it was useless to learn about Navajo culture when the U.S. did not have an embassy on the Navajo reservation. Hall worked with linguist George L. Trager to EVALUATING BRAND INTEGRITY 4 reconceptualize the FSI’s anthropology curriculum, uniting anthropological and linguistic perspectives to create a new framework that emphasized communication across cultures (Rogers et al., 2002). Much of Hall’s work focused on nonverbal aspects of communication, with particular emphasis on different cultures’ use of space and time. One of his better-known theories concerns the degree to which members of a culture use nonverbals to communicate information. Some countries, like the U.S., are very direct in their speech, tending to spell things out directly (Wurtz, 2006). Hall referred to these as low-context (LC) cultures, as only a small amount of information is communicated indirectly. Conversely, high-context (HC) cultures rely heavily on communicative cues other than words, such as tone, body language, and use of silence. Japan is one of the closest countries to the high-context end of the spectrum (Wurtz, 2006). In addition to their use of nonverbals, HC and LC cultures differ in their thought patterns. LC cultures hold the belief that there is an “objective truth that can be reached through linear processes of discovery” (Wurtz, 2006, p. 279). They emphasize logic and rationality and prefer to spell out every detail so that their message is understood exactly as it was sent. HC cultures employ more circular reasoning, jumping back and forth between cause and effect, or step one and step two, assuming that the listener will follow. They are characterized by indirect and cyclical conversation and writing styles and can even communicate without ever directly mentioning the subject of conversation (Wurtz, 2006). Languages of HC cultures are often structured in ways conducive to this kind of thinking, taking forms in which it is acceptable to leave out a topic or subject that is already mutually understood. Hall’s theory of high- and low-context cultures is often compared and connected to many other communication theories. The most common connection is to the six dimensions of cultural EVALUATING BRAND INTEGRITY 5 values identified by Geert Hofstede, a Dutch communications scholar. His original theory comprised four dimensions: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism-collectivism, and masculinity-femininity. He has since introduced two others, orientation toward time and indulgence-restraint. Individualism-collectivism correlates most closely to Hall’s theory and was in fact proposed as an alternative to the high-context/low-context dimension (Wurtz, 2006). The dimension examines whether individuals place a stronger emphasis on their own needs or the needs of a group. Individuals in collectivistic cultures value family history and relationships highly and tend to place stock in strong relationships and personal loyalties in both social and business contexts. One’s own needs are often set aside in favor of maintaining group harmony (Hofstede, 2011). HC cultures like Japan tend to be collectivistic. Individualistic cultures, on the other hand, emphasize the goals and achievements of the individual. People are expected to be independent, and competition in business is healthy and expected. Personal opinions are also highly valued (Hofstede, 2011). Individualism is more common in LC cultures such as the U.S. and is a key component of capitalist culture. The indulgence-restraint dimension was added to the Hofstede model in 2010 (Hofstede, 2011). Indulgent cultures allow “relatively free gratification of basic and natural human desires related to enjoying life and having fun” (Hofstede, 2011, p. 15). These cultures see higher percentages of their populations declaring themselves “very happy,” a higher importance of leisure, and more people actively involved in sports. In restrained cultures, the gratification of these needs is highly regulated by strict social norms. A perception of helplessness is prevalent, freedom of speech is seen as unimportant, and people are less likely to remember their positive EVALUATING BRAND INTEGRITY 6 emotions (Hofstede, 2011). Asia and Eastern Europe score higher in restraint, while North America and Western Europe fall toward the indulgence end of the scale. Standardization and Localization Two main schools of thought dominate the world of international advertising. Standardization refers to the practice of employing a unified marketing approach across all markets (Jeong, Kim, & Seo, 2018). This means that companies use the same logos, slogans, and commercials in every country in which they market their products. This practice arose from the assumption that the needs and preferences of consumers are becoming more homogeneous, so the same techniques and appeals will be equally effective. In order to communicate these appeals, advertisers use two main forms of language transfer: subtitling/captioning and dubbing/translation (Pagani, Goldsmith, & Perracchio, 2015). In a television advertisement, subtitling allows for the maintenance of the original dialogue, including the narrator’s or actors’ tone, inflection, or volume, as well as the original soundtrack. Conversely, dubbing allows for easier comprehension because viewers do not have to read while taking in the visual content of the ad (Pagani et al., 2015). Subtitling has become more popular in recent years because it is quicker and cheaper than dubbing (Pagani et al., 2015). Standardization