Coca Cola in India

Many cultural differences may have caused Coke’s difficulties in India. A major difficulty could have been communication. People from India express themselves in a totally different manner than Americans. For this simple reason, misunderstanding could have arisen. Another cultural difficulty could have been that India has many political and legal issues internally, which makes India less wholesome than the United States. These issues could have led to interference with Coke’s operations in that country. Also, both countries have different ways of doing business. The United States is ethnocentric; its investors are used to taking their rules and regulations over, which makes it difficult because they should adapt as every country has their own rules and regulations. If a polycentric approach was used by U.S., the consumers in India will react to it considering those practices are wrong and inappropriate. This could also have been the reason for India’s interference in stopping Coke’s operations due to the villagers’ accusation of the water shortage and contamination caused by Coca-Cola.
Lastly, every country is made up of different a culture, set of values, philosophy and background. Where India is concerned, the Asian market is known to be more conservative. India, a developing country which is still striving in poverty is very much traditional in their thinking as compared to the U.S which pays more attention to empowerment issues and service. Hence, this could also have been one of the aspects leading to the difficulties of Coke’s survival in India.

Coca-Cola can respond by announcing they will immediately check their water that they use for their products. If they were to find any pesticides in them, then they would do anything that they could to make the water safe and pesticide free. In the same way, they can also respond how other companies should have been tested as well if the pesticides were in the ground water. Similarly, Coca-Cola needs to find ways