Activity #2- Virtual Visit

For this assignment I actually looked at two companies. The first I observed was Apple. The USA Apple website is my homepage every time I open my internet browser, so I am very familiar with the page and all that it entails. I thought that for myself, it would be easy to compare something that I see every day to Ireland's version. Unfortunately for the sake of this assignment I was wrong. The websites were entirely identical with the exception of a link to watch a TV advertisement on the US site.

The Apple homepage for America

The Apple homepage for Ireland

This specific example falls in line with the global advertising paradox (pg. 7-8) where global advertisers tend to create universal advertisements rather than focusing on the needs of a specific culture. This creates a shared culture between the two nations and the marketing strategies throughout the corporation as a whole. This standardization of advertising may have been used to cut costs and time after the death of Steve Jobs, or it could simply be due to a lack of reason to advertise differently in these two regions. I did, however, find it a bit ironic that the TV ad was only seen on the USA homepage, further proving the laziness of our nation (ie. we couldn't read the information on the new MacBook Pro, but had to have the instant gratification of watching a 30 second commercial overviewing its features.)

Because I found no significant differences in Apple's websites, I decided to look into Coca-Cola. I knew already that Coke was a bit different in Ireland than in the States (real sugar, bottle shape, serving size) so I thought that the websites would market different aspects of Coke...fortunately for the sake of the assignment, I was 100% correct. 

The Coca-Cola homepage for America

The Coca-Cola homepage for Ireland

Although both pages mention the Olympics, I have to disregard it as a similarity because the entire world participates and obviously the USA page talks about Team USA and Ireland's page talks about Team Ireland. The American page is focused mainly on the competitiveness of the Olympics, along with branding (Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Coke Zero and Freestyle) and prizes. The Irish page's main focus is charity and recycling. This could potentially be due to different marketing techniques in the nations based on value and lifestyle research via the Research paradox (pg. 9-10)