Organizational design
In our company, international roles and responsibilities, distribution of power, and authority facilitate internal operations so that the international customer finds it easy to do business with our organization and we find it easy to work with the international customer.
Knowledge management
The way that information and knowledge is generated in our company, converted from local knowledge to global knowledge and shared across cultural and regional borders, is highly effective. We learn from our cultural experiences around the globe.
Motivational energy
In our company, senior management has created a global working environment where everyone is motivated to engage with the internationalization process of the organization. Thus the potential energy of the organization benefits from the positive emotional states of employees, creating a global mindset.
External focus
Our organization has contingency plans to deal with global technological, political, regulatory, or economic changes that may evolve as different alternate business scenarios unfold across the world.
Strategic vision
In our organization we have a clear strategic vision with supporting basic values and processes according to which we integrate local needs within a global perspective.
Competitiveness
Across our organization, management monitors and anticipates the future direction of key global competitors while constantly innovating its products and/or services.
Answers and rankings based on the above were varied. In particular there were significant differences between responses from senior management and middle management. The former were generally much more bullish about their organization's readiness for the global market - presumably because middle management recognized that it would be their role to implement and deliver on targets. Here's a summary.
Organizational readiness
Mean response from senior management
Mean response from middle management
Strategy development
Well developed
Partly developed
Performance
Needs more development
Over developed
measurement
Organizational design
Needs more development
Well developed
Knowledge management
Ongoing
Ongoing
Motivational energy
Well developed
Poorly developed
External focus
Needs more development
Satisfactory, but needs more development
Strategic Vision
Well developed
Poorly developed
Competitiveness
Well developed
Well developed
Source: clients of THT Consulting, 2000-2003.
The central thrust of this book is based on the analysis of the values of different cultures and the reconciliation of the dilemmas that these differences produce. But let's first note that fundamental marketing mistakes are too often still being made even at the most basic level of cultural differences.
Many of these arise simply from language, religion, and common courtesy. Established product names in one language may have different meanings in others. In advertisements, symbols or gestures in one culture (like the first finger and thumb) may have entirely opposite meanings in another. The color red, often meaning danger in western cultures, can send different messages about a product to Chinese audience, for whom red can represent success. Similarly, yellow as a color in marketing promotions may be offensive to Arabs when used in some contexts, yet convey freshness and summer in western cultures. Launches to promote new products, accompanied by buffet lunches, have been inappropriately scheduled during Ramadan in some parts of the Muslim world. The box on the following page gives some more examples of basic global marketing gaffes.
More important than these overt and more obvious aspects of culture are the differences that derive more subtly from the different meaning given by different cultures to apparently identical products or services.
We can more easily recognize explicit cultural differences by adopting an anti-ethnocentric approach, though we may not be aware of more implicit ones. Cultural due diligence is still absent from the management agenda and from many classic marketing models such as those of Porter. Most classical marketing theory has been based on single-culture research, especially the Anglo-American studies.
As explained in the introduction, it is our thesis that "culture" in today's marketplace is not simply a factor to be added in to the marketing equation, but a fundamental construct that pervades the whole of the marketing paradigm. As we noted there, this book is not a list of "dos and don'ts"; nor is it an ad hoc discussion of cases. We aim to offer a new conceptual framework that provides a way of thinking that can be generalized both across cultures and the spectrum of marketing activities, and that can be applied in a practical way.
Global gaffes
General Motors's promotion in Belgium for a car that had a "body by Fisher" turned out to have, in the Flemish translation, a "corpse by Fisher."
A Canadian importer of Turkish shirts destined for Quebec used a dictionary to help translate the label "Made in Turkey" into French. The final translation was "Fabrique en Dinde." True, dinde does mean turkey - the bird, not the country. That is Turquie.
KFC's "finger lickin' good" slogan was mistranslated in China as "eat your fingers off."
The Ford Pinto flopped when it was launched in Brazil. Mystified executives later learned that "pinto" is local slang for small genitals.
"Pepsi brings you back to life" was translated into Chinese as "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave."
The lager brand Coors' slogan, "turn it loose," became "suffer from diarrhea" in Spanish.
Our new marketing paradigm is intended to provide a robust framework for the marketer and is based on the Three Rs: recognize, respect, and reconciliation. The first step is to recognize that there are cultural differences in marketing. Different views about "where the customer is coming from" aren't right or wrong; they are just different. It is easy to be judgmental about people and societies that give a different meaning to their world. The next step is to respect these differences and accept the customer's rights to interpret the world, and our products and marketing efforts, in the way they choose.
Many marketing professionals have told us that very often their clients don't know what they want and that they therefore need to create a market (push). Others, however, say that a marketing professional should thrive on the needs of clients and be able to listen carefully to them (pull). As soon as an organization becomes international it is faced even more with the imperative to reconcile needs and wants. Where internally oriented cultures, such as the US, might start with technology push in order to connect it to the needs of clients at a later stage, the Japanese might first "listen" to their clients' needs and be pulled by them in order to attach them to the developments of technology at a later stage. Because of these different views of the world, we have two seemingly opposing views of the contrasting cultures - those of the seller and buyer. The classical approach is to focus solely on customer satisfaction: "To make what we know we can sell." But we also have to consider our own corporate knowledge: "To try to sell what we know we can make." Thus, in our new approach, the task of the marketer is much more than simply abandoning their own strengths for the sake of customer satisfaction: It is to reconcile these seemingly opposing orientations.