Intercultural Communication and Meadow Foods' China Market Entry

This case study analyzes Meadow Foods' attempt to expand its business into the Chinese market, focusing on the challenges posed by intercultural communication and the differences in market culture. The analysis highlights potential misunderstandings due to language and gestures, as well as the impact of China's regulatory barriers, low-price competition, and preference for face-to-face meetings. It concludes that investing in China may lead to failure due to the significant cultural and operational differences between the UK-based Meadow Foods and the Chinese market environment, suggesting a need for deep analysis and strategic planning before investment. Desklib offers a platform for students to access similar case studies and solved assignments for further learning.

Meadow Foods UK in
China

INTRODUCTION
Business is an activity of producing, buying and selling of goods and services with a
main motive of profit making. Meadow foods is an independently owned UK's largest dairy
group established in 1992(Curkan-Dróżka, 2019). They also deals in supplying dairy ingredients
to food industries. The following case study analysis the success and failure of Meadow foods in
Chinese market taking into account the two important factors.
TASK
Meadow is trying to expand its business in china as well. For this, it had to overcome the
following barriers-
 Intercultural communication- It refers to the practice of communicating with a person
of different culture. It can be verbal in the form of language or non-verbal in form of
gestures. The way both the countries communicate is very different. Whenever, Meadow
would like to address the other party, they will require a translator with them, in order to
understand each other(Hatoss, 2019). This will create a potential for misunderstandings.
It creates an hindrance as the other person may not be able to get the point the way it was
said.
Even if one party knew the language, the gesture of saying can prove to be a stone in the path. It
can happen that a joke crackled by Meadow is taken as an insult by the Chinese person. So,
Intercultural communication can act as a cause of failure of the firm.
 High and low Chinese market culture- It describes the competitiveness among the
organisations and even between the employees focussing on getting the work done. China
works on the policy of minimum or no foreign direct investment in its country. Thus have
made some regulatory barriers to control the entry of foreign companies into
china(Walheer, Zhang and Luo, 2020). Moreover, where Meadow tries its best to provide
quality goods to its customers, the later tries to produce the goods as cheaper as it can
neglecting the quality factor in the product. If the company is lucky enough to enter the
Chinese market, it would have to face the low price competition prevailing in the market.
To beat this, the company either had to satisfy with lower profits or drop the quality of its
product.

Also, china believes in face to face meetings irrespective of UK's culture which relies on emails
and phone calls (Kim and et. al., 2020). Thus, difference in market culture will not let the
company to work smoothly in China.
CONCLUSION
According to the above analysis, investing in China by the Meadow is going to be a
failure as the culture of the countries is far apart. Both the countries work in such environments
which have no similarities within. Even the mind set of the people of both the companies is
totally different. So, the corporation if opts to invest should analyse all the factors very deeply
and make a strategy to deal with it.

REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Curkan-Dróżka, E., 2019. III International Scientific and Practical Conference “Russian in
Intercultural Communication–Theory and Practice”. Acta Universitatis Lodziensis.
Folia Linguistica Rossica. 1(17). pp.127-128.
Hatoss, A., 2019. Linguistic landscapes: An experiential learning project for developing
intercultural competence. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 42(2). pp.146-170.
Kim, S. and et. al., 2020. Brand name and ethnicity of endorser in luxury goods: does a
glocalization strategy work in China?. International Journal of Advertising. 39(6).
pp.824-842.
Walheer, B., Zhang, L. and Luo, Y., 2020. Bidirectional technological spillover in the Chinese
star-rated hotel sector: An empirical investigation. Economic Modelling. 86. pp.210-
226.