Cultural Differences between Germany and the United States in Landing Page Design

Abstract

Companies with global operations should consider the culture of their target country in order to be internationally successful despite of globalization. Every marketing strategy should be adapted to the target country and its local cultural background. Companies which offer their products only through online channels need to pay special attention to the design of their websites. Therefore, we analyze in this study the design of United States and German landing pages in the online fitness industry and whether or not changes can improve the conversion rate of a landing page. To answer these questions, we develop and evaluate a culture specific landing page framework with a design science approach. The evaluation shows optimization potential of landing pages for the test elements “free content” and “promotional pictures”. Hence, the framework can be used to identify improvement potential for culture specific landing pages, but needs to be validated in other areas, too.