International Communications Strategy

Developments in Cross-Cultural Communications, PR and Social Media

Silvia Cambié, Yang-May Ooi

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780749458270
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

International Communications Strategy is about the cross-cultural challenges currently facing PR practitioners. Offshoring, globalisation and the rise of China and India have been triggering unprecedented change in the communication sector.New channels of global communications are also being opened up by social media tools, bringing different cultures across the world together instantaneously online. Understanding cross-cultural aspects of PR includes understanding the culture of different societies, online culture itself and cross-border uses of social media.Communication is seen less and less as an operational function. While in the past organizations seemed to need communication practitioners only for colourful brochures and press releases, you are now expected to provide strategic advice and help senior executives to engage effectively with stakeholders in various parts of the world. At the same time, you are required to be knowledgeable about social media and internet cultures and to be able to link on-line and off-line PR work successfully.By providing information on alternative approaches as well as containing cross-cultural case-studies and examples, the book will give you points of reference and ideas that you will be able to use every time you are asked to provide strategic communication guidance to senior management/clients.

Part 1

International communications

1	The world we live in

It was well after midnight. Co-author Cambié had landed in the middle of Kazakhstan, only three years after the fall of the Soviet Union.

She had read a number of spy novels and was feeling rather nervous at the prospect of having to go through immigration as the only European on the plane.

Little did she know that the exchange she would have with a smiling Kazakh officer would change her way of looking at the world.

Still under the influence of cold-war mythology, the last question she had expected to be asked in the middle of post-communist Central Asia was whether the football team of her home town in Italy would continue to move from victory to victory. The immigration officer’s passion for football was so strong that it lit up his entire face and created an instant bond between him and CambiÈ.

Communication is not only about producing messages you want other people to hear. It is about understanding what moves the listener. And in order to be able to do that, you need to know the listener’s points of reference, their culture, their values, their ways of relating to the world.

What Cambié experienced that night in the heart of Central Asia was a simple lesson in cross-cultural communication. It came at a time when the world had begun to change dramatically after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Change is still happening. It is drawing everybody closer to other parts of the world. And it is making us realize that we need to look at them in a different way. We can no longer expect people in other cultures to adopt the way we think and communicate. We are experiencing the end of one era and the beginning of a new one.

The media are already writing about the termination of the oneway globalization of Western culture that reached its peak in the 1970s and 1980s.¹ New York Timescolumnist Thomas Friedman believes that ‘Globalization 3.0 is going to be more and more driven not only by individuals but also by a much more diverse – non-Western, non-white group of individuals’.²

We are indeed experiencing the end of the era of complacency. A combination of new phenomena has been creating a new awareness. And this awareness is making audiences around the world more sophisticated.

It is good news for the communication profession, which for years has been fighting for recognition. Business executives are waking up to the idea that they need communicators to produce much more than colourful brochures. They need experts able to get the message across to new audiences and new markets by using new technologies. The time has come for corporations to have a much more strategic view of communication.

Friedman writes that in order to thrive in the ‘Globalization 3.0’ era, individuals have to have ‘a certain mental flexibility, self-motivation, and psychological mobility’.³ In other words they need to be highly creative. Communication is about creativity. This is why we believe that our time offers unprecedented opportunities for communicators.

Let’s have a look at the phenomena of the new era and the impact they are having on the way we talk to each other.

China’s global role

The world is about to undergo a major political and economic power shift.

The investment bank Goldman Sachs expects the list of the world’s ten leading economies in 2050 to be very different from the one we have today. Over the next 50 years, Brazil, Russia, India and China – what the bank calls BRICs – are likely to play a much more prominent role in the global economy. By 2025, they will most probably account for more than half the size of the G6, even if today they are worth less than 15 per cent.⁴

And the impact of the rise of China is already being felt outside Asia. The country is playing an important role in Africa, where it has bought stakes in oil companies and has been strongly contributing to the local infrastructure. Sudan’s economy is already heavily dependent on China, which owns 40 per cent of its largest oil firm.⁵ Angola was the largest exporter of oil to China in 2006 and the beneficiary of a major influx of Chinese construction companies.⁶

Africa will be able to profit from the growth model that China is exporting to this continent. It is building a hub for copper and other metals in Zambia by linking the country by rail, road and shipping lanes to the rest of the world. China is also creating a trading hub in Mauritius that will provide its businesses with access to the common market of East and Southern Africa. Africa is being transformed by the competition to attract Chinese investment.⁷

China used to be nothing more than the factory to the world and is now moving to leave a strong mark.

We can also expect China to make an impact on international communication practices. The country is used to dealing with ambiguity, with problems like political corruption, environmental degradation, violation of human rights and rural poverty. It is used to thinking in terms different from the black-and-white scenario typical of the Euro-and-North-America-centric view of the world. Since Globalization 3.0 is bound to bring us in contact with other countries facing ambiguity, China might be better equipped to communicate with them.

We used to think of China as the mass producer of fake designer goods, but those days are over. China is embracing creativity and its universities are graduating thousands of design students every year. They offer programmes in design strategy, innovative thinking and sustainability.⁸ The country seems to be finding a new way of expressing itself. And we can expect China to want to play a leadership role in the global community and to influence the way it communicates.

Courting the fledgling consumer

The global market has been courting other BRIC countries besides China. The reason for this attraction lies largely in their growing middle class.

India’s middle class totals 200 million people and accounts for 20 per cent of its population.⁹ The country’s economy has already more than doubled since economic reforms began in 1991. And the swelling middle class is leading its expansion through a new consumer boom. The number of India’s mobile-phone subscribers rose from 2 million in 2004 to 55 million in 2007 and is expected to reach 250 million in 2012.

These are highly promising figures if we consider that mobile phones are tipped to become the next major source of advertising income, much bigger than television, radio, print media or internet advertising. According to forecasts, annual expenditure will reach US $11.4 billion by 2011.¹⁰

International consumer brands are now chasing the huge Indian consumer market. When you operate in a complex reality like that of India, you need to develop a new kind of creativity. You need to stretch your imagination and put yourself in the shoes of a public that might be very remote from every experience you have ever had in your life. This is what Nokia did with the Indian version of its 1100 mobile phone. To respond to the needs of local consumers living in areas troubled by power shortages, Nokia developed a shock-resistant phone with a battery that lasts for two days and a built-in flashlight that can be used as a torch in case of emergency.

This is the kind of imagination required by Globalization 3.0. And India is becoming an inspiration to the rest of the world in terms of innovative business.

According to Naina Lal Kidwai, HSBC India’s Chief Executive, ‘India is a market for experimentation for many companies; new technologies and trial runs of products are often undertaken in India, and this grants the poorer classes access to goods that were previously unavailable – laptops, mobile phones, cars.’¹¹ This attitude combines entrepreneurship with social business and creates products for a low-wage earning market, which are likely to benefit other parts of the world.

Tata Nano, the world’s cheapest car, was launched in India in 2008 and is expected to be made available also in Latin America, SouthEast Asia and Africa. Ratan Tata, the chairman of the company that makes the Nano, came up with the idea while watching Indian families of three or four travelling on a motor scooter. He wanted to make it possible for India’s emerging middle class to buy their first car ever. Nano, also referred to as the ‘People’s Car’, costs only 100,000 rupees (US $2,500). It is the result of five years of research conducted by a team of 500 engineers. Tata minimized costs by limiting the use of steel and providing the car with a no-frills interior.

Nano is expected to have an impact on India that goes beyond opening up the car market to low-income consumers. So far, the growth dynamic of the country’s economy has been based on technology services rather than manufacturing expertise. The success of Tata Motors’s latest invention could shift this focus.¹²

Communicators will need to keep India on their radar screen not only because of its huge consuming classes. India’s media and entertainment business is also experiencing strong growth, thanks to the higher income younger generations are earning. The sector is expected to develop from US $11 billion to US $25 billion by 2011.¹³ Bollywood, the Mumbai-based film industry, is teaming up with other media groups around the world and is becoming a household name among international audiences. How long until the style and values associated with Bollywood movies enter the international entertainment business? How long until they have an impact on other forms of communication? Probably not very long. Bollywood dance steps seem to have been as effective as Japanese anime, or animation, in penetrating global youth culture.¹⁴

India is not the only place where the consumer goods industry and its communicators will be hunting for new audiences. In Brazil and Mexico, sales of cars, computers and consumer electronics have been booming. In the whole of Latin America, 15 million households moved out of poverty between 2002 and 2006. Following this trend, a small majority is expected to have joined the middle class by 2010.¹⁵ This is good news for the most unexpected products. Thirty years ago, deodorants were almost unheard of in Brazil. Unilever, the world’s largest producer of deodorants with brands like Dove and Axe, now has yearly sales worth 400 million euros in this country. In Argentina, its share of the deodorants market increased from 50 per cent in the late 1990s to 70 per cent in 2006.¹⁶ And with only half of the world’s population using deodorants, Unilever’s hopes in emerging markets are still high.

A new type of multinational

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) published a report in 2008 on the 100 best performing companies from emerging economies. BCG’s ‘100 New Global Challengers: How Top Companies from Rapidly Developing Economies are Changing the World’ lists local enterprises from countries like China, Braz...