Intercultural Issues in Online Communication: A German-Egyptian Comparison

Inhaltsangabe: Abstract: In these times of rapid increase of internet usage, the question arises for multinational companies (MNCs) whether to standardise or adapt their internet presence to different cultural groupings or even subcultures. The overall target of this research is therefore to assist MNCs by producing recommendations concerning the promotion of products and services for a particular transnational consumer group. Therefore, country-specific websites of companies rooted in different cultural origins are selected for this research, namely EgyptAir, Mercedes-Benz and SonyEricsson. This analysis follows the inductive research approach embedding elements of an ethnographic and exploratory research method. The main part of the empirical study is conducted by means of an online-behaviourist questionnaire following the quantitative research approach and complementary a culture-related questionnaire following the qualitative research approach. The sample size is composed of Egyptian students from the Misr International University in Cairo and German students from Heilbronn University forming the selected samples. Even though Egypt is a developing country and Germany an industrialised one, the samples are comparable due to the similar social and educational backgrounds. The research results are applied to the lifestyle typology segmentation method, namely the Euro-Social-Styles of the GfK thus creating a new model of six lifestyle typologies in which the two samples are categorised. It is revealed by the main findings that the respective companies deal despite the different nationalities of the samples, with a transnational consumer group which is characterised by a relative homogeneity. Nevertheless, not all values and traits are similar within this consumer group and it therefore requires a certain degree of adaptation of marketing activities. It was possible to identify within the scope of this research that, in general, companies enjoying a high brand