ADVERTISING AND PROMOTIONAL ACTIVITY

Advertising & promotional activity should be same in developed & developing countries?



Advertising & promotional activity should be same in developed & developing countries?

Introduction

Advertising within a nation in today's world may contain certain distinctive values and features, yet it has to be understood in the context of the larger ongoing process of globalization. This is a phenomenon that has given rise to fairly heated discussion and debate among laypeople, scholars, politicians, workers and business people of different stripes during recent decades. Globalization can be seen as a historical process of interaction and integration of people representing a variety of commercial, noncommercial, government and nongovernmental institutions throughout the world, facilitated in the latest phase by the emergence of a global digital information network (Cheng, 2004, p167).

Discussion

Globalization as a phenomenon has been associated with free market-based classical liberal economic policies pursued by developing and transitional societies of the world, that have embraced Western, more precisely, American values and modes of doing things not only in the realms of economics and politics but more visibly in the production, consumption and circulation of popular culture products, manifested in a pervasive process of commodification through advertising. Some social theorists seem to have pointed out that at its core globalization is a process of fundamental changes in which spatial and temporal features in human existence and their activities undergo dramatic transformation as distance between geographic locations is compressed or annihilated leading to a new sense or perception of space and temporality.

We have known, as Marshall McLuhan (2004) pointed out, that new communication systems devised by humans throughout history have not only extended human senses and opened up incredible opportunities for communication but they profoundly shaped the human psyche in unanticipated ways. For example, development of print technology in the fifteenth century undoubtedly gave us a vast array of reading materials but it also reinforced a linear, rational and logical way of thinking and developing arguments that on the surface would seem to be totally unrelated to the technology itself. We shape technology to meet our needs but it often ends up shaping us (Cheng, 1994, p167).

Proponents of the 'one world, one voice' approach to global advertising believe that the era of the global village is fast approaching, and that tastes and preferences are converging world-wide. Globalization in the contemporary phase through digital revolution has the potential of integrating disparate human groups to a point that national and local boundaries and the traditional concept of a community rooted in a geographic area may lose their meaning.

Globalization in today's world clearly has implications for every conceivable arena of human endeavor, especially for cultural products and commodities where they are accessible to people as part of a global market. Therefore, marketers and multinational advertisers are concerned about strategies as how best to market products: through standardized, uniform advertising through an emphasis on universal brand identity or glocalization where the emphasis would be on identifying and making use of idiosyncratic local values ...