Disney Company is one of most successful operator of theme parks in the world, and their theme park in America and Japan achieved great success but the situation in Europe is not so good. The article uses some aspects of the Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and Trompenaars’ research on organisational culture to compare the cultural difference between America and France, then find out three mistakes that the company made in managing its Euro Disney operation through the case study. In the following sectors, the three lessons the company should have learned about how to deal with diversity based on its experience will be described. More rapid development in the trend of multinational companies, the cross-cultural management has become a major part of business. The purpose of this paper is to obtain some favorable factors to the future development of Euro Disney by the above analysis.
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Trompenaars classify the corporate culture into four kinds: the family, the Eiffel Tower, the guided missile and the incubator. The dimensions he used to distinguish different corporate cultures are equality-hierarchy and orientation to the person-orientation to the task (Sanchez, Paul. 2004) . The America corporate culture is belong to the third one, this kind of corporate culture has task-oriented characteristics, the employees should comply with some fixed rules and have high efficiency. The employer always pay more attention to your work results rather than the process, they request the employees should be loyal to the professions and projects greater than be loyal to the company, so the atmosphere in the company is some serious. Compared to the America corporate culture, the French corporate generally do not have terms of the corporate culture. The French company will never give you a sick book which tell you what you should do and which kind of language you should speak, but these things are very clarified to every branch. Only in this way the culture can show flexible and efficient. Many people will find it very strange how could be so efficiency under the circumstance that having not a detail arrangement and rules. This is a wonderful phenomenon in The French corporate. In a word, the French company pay more attention to human and the corporate culture which think highly of the deep-rooted relations between people and there is a relaxed and harmonious atmosphere in the company.
The three mistakes
In determining the target market did not take into account cultural differences Euro Disney’s choice of location focus on the aspects of financial and population, then Euro Disney theme park located in the populous central Europe. Disney executives did not see that Mickey Mouse and intellectuals in the region of the left bank of the Seine in Paris can not live in harmony and France is serious about their intellectual. In retrospect, Paris is not the best place to establish such a theme park, so the establishment of the Disney parks is a declaration of war to intellectuals of French. Disney’s manager stated publicly some of the criticism is “the nonsense of a small number of business” would not help them a favor. This may can be well operated according to American culture, while the French pay more attention to their own cultural elite and regard this refute as attack of national quality.
Having not adequately take into account the habits of the French when arrange the service kinds Disney do not provide breakfast because they think that the Europeans do not eat breakfast. In addition, the Disney company does not provide alcoholic beverages within the park, but the French habits are different, they are used to drinking a cup while taking lunch, which aroused the anger of the French. Disney executives did not estimate that the European are not interested in vacation in theme park so much, in the attitude of Disney Company the European will be happy about spending a few days in a theme park like the American and Japanese, but middle-class in Europe just want to “get away from everything around” and go to the coast or the mountains, and Euro Disney is the lack of such appeal.
No combination of French culture to the local staff management Disney has taken global standard model as same as the Japanese business, they transplanted the American culture to France directly then doing this result with a serious clash of cultures. The Disney Company use many measures that departed with the local culture, for example, in the Euro Disney, the France worker are requested to comply with the strict appearance code as the other theme parks in United States and Japan do, the workers are asked to break their ancient cultural aversions to smiling and being consistently polite to the park guest even must mirror the multi-country makeup of its guest. In addition, the Disney Company brought their U.S. Pop culture to France and fought hard for a greater “local cultural context”. The French people think that this is an attack on their native culture, so they adopted an unfriendly attitude toward to the arrival of the Disney, including the protest come from the intellectual and the local residence and farmers.
The three lessons
Multinational companies should target market accurately Even in the same country or regional market, the traditional culture makes different control power to different people. Multinational companies should be fully based on detailed market research to find the weak links in the market and make a breakthrough, use the “point to an area” model to expand. For example, McDonald’s opened in the Chinese market, its target is no longer work for the busy working-class, but the children. The golden arches mark, the joy atmosphere of the shop, the furnished toys, full of playful ads, as well as various promotional activities specifically carry out for children, these have a tremendous appeal to the target customers . McDonald think that adult eating habits difficult to change, only those children whose taste not yet formed are the potential customers of Western fast food culture, the McDonald received Broad market recognition and have huge market potential.
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Multinational enterprises should pay full attention to the importance of the influence of cultural differences on marketing Face to the new multiple culture environment, the multinational enterprise should take an objective acknowledge about the cultural differences of the consumer demand and behavior and respect it, abandoning the prejudice and discrimination of culture completely(Burnett, Sally-Ann, Huisman, Jeroen, 2010). Moreover, multinational enterprises should be good at finding out and using the base point of communication and collaboration of different cultures and regard this base point as the important consideration factor when plan to enter the target country market. After all, the fundamental criterion for a successful business enterprise is whether it can integrate into the local social and cultural environment. The multinational enterprises should improve the sensitivity and adaptability to the different culture environment.
Multinational enterprises should make full use of the competitive advantages of cultural differences and promote international marketing The objective of international cultural differences can also be the basic demand points of different competitive strategy. In the international market, launching culture marketing activities and highlighting the exotic culture and cultural differences in the target market can open the market quickly. Companies should strive to build cross-cultural “two-way” communication channels, it is necessary to adapt to the host’s cultural environment and values and carry out the business strategy of localization to make it can be widely accepted by the host country local government, local partners, consumers and other relevant stakeholders . Effective cross-cultural communication on the one hand contribute to cultural integration, but also can create a harmonious internal and external human environment for corporate management.
Conclusion
From the Euro Disney’s failure in the initial stage, we should realize deeply that cultural factors play enormous role in the process of expanding overseas of the enterprises and lack of cross-cultural awareness will bring out failure of the business. With the increase and deepen of the economical contact, transnational marketing received more and more attention. If the multinational companies can not handle properly the culture difference between foreign markets and home market in the whole marketing management process, the result will be that low profit with higher cost even lead to bankruptcy.
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