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Effective Persuasion of International Business Sales Letters

An Emic-etic Perspective

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Abstract

  • Language usage has attracted increasing research attention in international business studies. Yet scarce research has been done on the use of language in sales letters across cultures.

  • Our paper, using a combined etic-emic approach aims to compare Chinese and New Zealand managers’ reflective accounts of persuasive strategies and the function of sales letters used in these two countries. In particular, we seek to contribute to an improved in-depth cross-cultural understanding through an investigation using emic sources of language and persuasion.

  • Our findings indicate that language and persuasion play a significant role in sales letters, the Chinese managers focusing more on building qing (positive affect) with the reader whereas the NZ managers sought a more immediate reaction to their sales pitch and informal engagement with the reader.

  • Furthermore, also based on the insights gained reflectively and reflexively from our discussion, these differences were closely related to persuasion strategies which are also important parameters influencing cross-cultural adaptations.

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Acknowledgments

Being a Chinese native, the first author felt the need for including a different perspective for this cross-cultural comparative study. Professor Herbert Hildebrandt kindly agreed to co-author this paper in order to reflect both inside and outside perspectives. Thanks are also given to Gavin Jack, Pingxin Zhang, Pervez Ghauri, Tony Diller, Mandy Scott and Alastair Tombs for their input towards earlier versions of this paper. Special thanks are given to the Editor Professor Michael-Jörg Oesterle and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and insights.

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  1. Business School, University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia

    Yunxia Zhu

  2. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Herbert W. Hildebrandt

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  1. Yunxia Zhu
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Correspondence to Yunxia Zhu.

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Zhu, Y., Hildebrandt, H. Effective Persuasion of International Business Sales Letters . Manag Int Rev 53, 391–418 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11575-012-0154-z

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