Brand engagement on social media: Case study of intercultural raction comparison to commercial media content of Purina brands

The aim of this thesis is to understand how the same marketing media content affects audiences of different cultures. Many global brands are managed centrally with unified marketing communication shared across the nations. Content relevance is tested abroad and may not be relevant to all countries where the communication is published. McQuail in his book Introduction to Mass Communication, mentions that different cultures accept the same media content with different effects. I will use a case study for the analysis of intercultural communication of centrally managed brands that will examine the difference in responses of Facebook users to centrally created marketing communication of the Felix and ProPlan brands that belong under the umbrella brand Purina. I divided the case study into two parts, the first part will be devoted to the content analysis of documents, statistics and already existing research from which I formulated research questions. The second part is a semiotic analysis of comments of the Facebook users to the Purina brands that is answering the research questions. The data from the comments shows that the reactivity within the two countries studied differed significantly and depended on the cultural differences defined by Hofstede's cultural comparison. Based on this case study, it..