Are Culturally Congruent Websites More Effective? an Overview of a Decade of Empirical Evidence

ABSTRACT The current paper reviews all high quality studies investigating the impact of the cultural congruency of websites on measures of website effectiveness. In order to be able to present a comprehensive overview of the findings, the various performance measures included in the different studies are integrated within the WEBQUAL framework [Loiacono et al. 2007]. Hypotheses are formulated and subsequently tested for the different effectiveness variables. Results are summarized using vote count and descriptive summary. The purpose is to generate robust conclusions, since the results of the individual studies are very scattered. The main conclusion is that the literature provides sound empirical support for the positive impact of cultural congruency on the performance measures "usefulness", "ease of use", "positive attitudes", "positive intentions", and "overall effectiveness". For some performance measures, however, support for the positive effect of cultural congruity is weak or missing. Based on this comprehensive, in-depth overview, research gaps are identified and suggestions for further research are provided. Keywords: website design, cultural adaptation, website effectiveness, website performance, literature review 1. The internet: A culturally sensitive marketing medium after all The Internet has been anticipated to trigger a substantial globalization process [Angelides 1997]. As a global communication and transaction medium [Kogut 2004], the Internet should technically be capable of enabling providers and consumers worldwide to communicate or to conduct transactions through a single channel, a website [Steenkamp and Geyskens 2006]. In this view, one central website should suffice for an organization to reach all consumers, everywhere, 24/7. However, looking at online reality, a different picture emerges. Many internationally active organizations operate not one, but several websites, each aimed at a different target country or group of countries. To illustrate this, as of June 11, 2009 Swatch operated websites for 39 different countries, Unicef operated 110 websites, and Coca-Cola even as many as 125. A brief look at these different websites per company reveals that these sites are dissimilar, not only in language and products provided but also in navigation modes, colors, etc. As a matter of fact, an important stream of literature in marketing science has investigated whether websites aimed at different target countries do actually differ from one another [e.g., Becker and Eastman 2002; Cyr and Trevor-Smith 2004; Okazaki and Rivas 2002; Robbins and Stylianou 2003; Singh and Matuso 2004; Sinkovics et al. 2007]. The majority of these studies, which are predominantly based on rigorous content analyses, conclude that websites targeted at different countries are indeed dissimilar. These dissimilarities appear to run deep and involve culturally rooted customs such as color associations, tone of text, and type of pictures. The observation that websites reflect a target country's culture is called "cultural congruency" [Singh et al. 2006a], "cultural congruity" [Steenkamp and Geyskens 2006], "cultural similarity" [Dou et al. 2003], or "cultural familiarity" [Dou et al. 2003]. While many researchers have reached a consensus on the fact that websites targeted at a specific country reflect that target country's culture, an interesting, related, and even more important question arises: What is the reason behind the cultural congruency of websites? Are websites culturally congruent because they are designed by someone of the local culture, who (consciously or unconsciously) translates his own culture into the contents of the site? Or do online organizations presume that Internet users from different countries have different website interface requirements and are they consequently deliberately designing their websites to be culturally congruent? The process of designing a website to be intentionally coherent with the culture of the target country is called "cultural adaptation" [Sinkovics et al. …