Effective Persuasion of International Business Sales Letters

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.