2.B Doing business across cultures. Cultural awareness

Cultural Awareness means understanding of how people of different cultures live, communicate and behave in different situations and using this knowledge to adapt your own behavior. You have to know their values, traditions, religion, behavior rules and taboos not only for personal communication but also for doing business successfully in the global market.

Globalization makes cultural awareness absolutely essential for any company doing business abroad. Understanding a foreign culture can mean keeping or losing a customer. Special attention should be paid to negotiating styles, punctuality, etiquette, topics for conversation and corporate hospitality.

How can you get skills of cross-cultural communication? There are lots of Internet sites and special guidebooks for businessmen offering recommendations on how to behave in different situations. The best universities have courses on cross-cultural awareness and doing business abroad. But the best way is to meet people of different cultures personally.

Some details of doing business across culture:

1. Exchange business cards

2. Shaking hands

3. Kissing

4. Small talk before meeting

5. Being formal/informal

6. Punctuality

7. Humor

8. Giving presents

9. Being direct (saying exactly what you think)

10. Using first names

11. Dress-code.

3.A Characteristics of branded goods. Brand strategy options

What makes a brand different from a product?

We understand brand as a name, design or symbol which makes one company’s product different from another. Brand is:

• good quality and design, a wide range and prestige

A powerful brand is a dream of any company. The modern strategy of developing of a successful brand is “Don’t try to sell the product, try to sell experience”. When you convince a customer to buy your brand, you must show him how all his life will change when he has it.

3.B Outsourcing production. Its impact on quality

The word “Outsourcing” means the process of contracting some functions of your business to another company. Outsourcing has a lot of advantages:

1. cut costs (due to moving the production to low-cost countries with cheap workforce and raw materials)

2. company has more money for innovations and development, which makes its market position stronger

3. save money on transportation

On the other hand, outsourcing can damage quality and reputation. It can be caused by:

• low-skilled workforce,

• lack of technology and modern equipment,

• poor system of quality control

• and other factors.

Western companies using outsourcing have to be aware of these problems, because they

risk losing customers.

4.A Advertising media and methods. Advantages and disadvantages

Advertising is the impersonal presentation of a sales-creating message to large groups of people. It involves different types of media. The most popular and efficient of them are: television, radio, newspapers and magazines, yellow pages, outdoor advertising and specialty advertising. Each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages.

	Advantages	Disadvantages
Television	very large audiences	"king" of advertising costs
Radio	relatively inexpensive way of reaching people	1) you can't review a radio commercial 2) a lot of radio stations( it is difficult to make radio advertising targeted) 3) people don't listen to the radio all the time
newspaper	can contain details( such as prices and telephone numbers)	poor print quality
Yellow Pages	one ad works all year long	you are immediately placed with a group of your competitors
outdoor Ad.	People can't "switch it off" or "throw it out" whether they like it or not	attracts attention only for 2 or 3 seconds

Companies usually try to use a combination of several media.

If some years ago the most popular of them were exhibitions, free samples and slogans, now many businesses have also discovered product placement, public transport, celebrity endorsement. Most innovations are connected with the internet, for example, viral advertising.

Anyway, the choice of advertising media and methods depends on the product or service, the target audience and the budget.