Interpretation of airline company commercials using hofstede's cultural dimensions: Examples of Turkish Airlines, Lufthansa and Sunexpress

The aim of this study is to explain Turkish Airlines, Lufthansa and SunExpress commercials on YouTube on the basis of Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions. All three airlines have different marketing strategies and approaches to social media. For this study, specifically, their YouTube channels' data and the videos gathered under four topics, safety, sport event, national oriented and international oriented, have been used to compare the airlines' given importance to their YouTube channels and to trace the cultural dimensions of Hofstede in the selected videos. Even though, the different kind of advertisements of airlines have been studied in various ways in previous studies, especially using YouTube as the main social media has never been considered in this context. That's why this study and the ones will be generated accordingly have a great possibility to shape the minds of marketing departments of the airlines. The results have shown that especially the national oriented videos tend to include cultural features of the country. While Turkish Airlines puts great effort on its YouTube channel and the diversity of the videos, Lufthansa is a little bit behind on the number of views, subscribers and the range of the video types etc. SunExpress 10 also emphasizes the cultural traces of both Turkey and Germany in the national oriented videos, however, it has been found that its being a low-cost carrier and having different priorities than two flag carries makes it not logical to compare it to other two airlines. In this direction, embracing an interdisciplinary approach in marketing including human resources, business administration, sociology and psychology is vital in this constantly changing environment.