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Abstract
Purpose - This is a case study of Coca-Cola's Chinese web site. It aims to examine how Coca-Cola, the number one brand in the world, is using its web site to communicate with the publics in the world's largest market.
Design/methodology/approach - Uses a qualitative text analysis.
Findings - Coca-Cola is practicing a "glocal" strategy, which integrates the ethnocentric and polycentric model in international public relations, to communicate with the Chinese publics through its Chinese web site.
Originality/value - This study provides insights for understanding the theory and practice of global corporate public relations.
Keywords Public relations, Globalization, Worldwide web, China
Paper type Case study
Global public relations is an important aspect of corporate public relations today. Companies from different countries are conducting business in different regions across the world, and they are therefore communicating with publics from different cultures. As the process of globalization is denned as "the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole" (Robertson, 1992, p. 8), it is important to ask how cultural factors affect the communications between companies and their publics in the "compressed world."
This question becomes even more important when it is investigated in the context of the internet, as the internet seems to be an ideal medium for globalization, given its capacity for expanding geographic locations. The internet has been used extensively for corporate communications. Companies use the internet to communicate with both their internal and external publics in a variety of ways, among which corporate web sites are an important one. Corporate web sites are a significant component of corporate communication (Kent and Taylor, 2003), and they have become an icon for a company in a manner similar to that of a corporate logo (Esrock and Leichty, 2000). The cross-national nature of the internet allows companies to use their web sites to communicate with their publics and to manage their images on a global scale. However, this global communication does not necessarily mean that it is a standardized process.
Previous studies have identified the two aspects of the process of globalization. While some researchers suggest that globalization is a homogenous process (Barker, 1999; Hall, 1991; Nyamnjoh, 1999), other researchers argue that globalization can be a heterogeneous...