글로벌기업 홈페이지 콘텐츠의 비교문화론적 분석

Cross-cultural Analysis of Global Corporate Web Sites: The Case of the Automobile Industry

The purpose of this paper is to find new culture-related content that were not tackled in previous studies and test how these new contents were related with cultural values. Five automobile multinational corporations (GM, Ford, Hyundai, Toyota, and Volkswagen) were randomly selected from the Global 500 lists. A total of 460 websites of these companies from ninety-two countries were investigated to test hypotheses regarding the relationship between cultural values and website content. After reviewing previous research on website content from 1992 to 2014, we found twenty types of new content including Application, Accessibility, Book a service, Corporate Governance, Community, Recruitment scams, Sustainability, Social Network Services, Technology and Warranty. Among them, twelve types of content were expected to have association with cultural values. Results from the study reveal that community content showed significant differences between high and low individualism dimensions. Significant differences were found between high and low power distance culture in terms of accessibility content while warranty content has significant association with long-term orientation dimension. Furthermore, strategy content has a significant association with short-term orientation dimension. Among the six cultural dimensions, newly discovered content showed significant association with three cultural dimensions such as individualism, power distance, long-term orientation and uncertainty avoidance.