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The impact of store atmosphere elements on the purchase behaviour and emotions of customers has an important significance in modern marketing. How to design and conceptualize a store atmosphere in such a way that it provides an unforgettable experience for the customer and entices him or her to arouse an interest in the store environment is one of the most fundamental concerns merchants and marketers must ask and think through these days – likewise, the role of culture in connection with store atmosphere is necessary to understand. The goal of this paper is to answer the question on how behavioural and emotional responses to store atmospheric elements such as visual, aural, olfactory, tactile, social, exterior design, interior design and layout & design differ across individualist and collectivist cultures. A cross-cultural analysis between Germans and non-Germans is made in respect to the posed question. A quantitative online survey was conducted, in which a total of 99 valid participants took part, of which 57 were Germans and 42 were non-Germans. This research extended the study of Barros et al. (2019) and added two more separate store atmospheric elements which are the general exterior design and the general interior design. The data was then analyzed, and the findings were ultimately presented. The findings showed that overall store atmosphere elements have similar emotional and behavioural effects on individualist and collectivist cultures with the exception of the general exterior design element, where a significant difference was found. This paper gives a comprehensive overview on the importance of store atmospheric elements in retail and the comparison between Germany which acts as a country that scored relatively high on the Individualism dimension of Hofstede’s national culture model and the countries Turkey, Russia, Portugal, Albania, Bosnia, Romania, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Iraq which serve as a union of cultures that performed high on the Collectivism dimension. Additional research on the topic needs to be done on how culture affects shopper’s emotional and behavioural responses.
As the fourth most populous countries in the world, Indonesia likely has many workforce from various age groups. The latest government demographic survey showed that there are many Indonesians who are in their productive ages. However, some employers have similar perspectives that many potential workers in Indonesia still lack employability.
This thesis attempts to discuss about Indonesians’ lack of employability based on the analysis of cultural background and education. Many researches show that education and cultural values might affect the employability. Therefore, there will be some further analysis on how exactly Indonesia’s culture and education system directly affect the Indonesians’ employability.
Some parts of this thesis also discuss the Tionghoa ethnic group in Indonesia. The discussion is to learn some lessons from the said ethnic group, since many Tionghoa tend to be successful businessmen in Indonesia, despite being minority ethnic group who receive so many discriminations from other Indonesia’s ethnic groups.
As a part of empirical evidence, there was a survey conducted to prove the arguments in this thesis. Six initial hypothesizes about ethnic groups’ perspectives of Indonesia’s education and employability, which formulated the survey’s questionnaires, are proven to be true. That means, it is safe to assume that the theories provided in this thesis were also proven to be accurate. Unfortunately, the reliability of the survey is pretty low, most likely due to the small number of participants and small number of the questions.
Admittedly, Indonesia’s education system and culture still need some developments to improve the employability of its citizens. Therefore, the last part of this thesis tries to give some possible recommendations that might help the Indonesians refining their employability and competitive advantages against the foreign workforce.