Cultural Awareness in Globalized World | Ralph Strozza | TEDxNorthernIllinoisUniversity

I am really very happy to be here and very proud as an NIU alumnus to have been invited to the first TED event here at NIU in DeKalb. It's so much more meaningful to me because 37 years ago I was sitting where you're sitting. and I had classes in this auditorium, in fact, the class was called Monday Night at the Movies. I don't think they have it anymore. It was so easy. It was fun. He was one of those generation Eds you just brought along. for credit and I didn't have to study, but anyway I'm very happy to be here and we're going to change the topic a little bit from robots and fruit flies and plant memories and all these other great presentations to talk about about

cultural

awareness

, okay?

We are going to talk about the importance of

cultural

awareness

for organizations, companies, entities that want to interact across cultural borders. Well, I'm going to talk a little bit about the importance for these organizations of conducting market research to understand their target audience. because without that they are not going to be successful and I am going to give some examples of companies that did not do well and some examples of how we are evolving in our thinking due to our interconnected and

globalized

world

, let's hope this works, it works, our

world

has changed quickly in a very short period of time.

Geopolitical orientation has created vast new markets that for all practical purposes did not exist twenty-five years ago. Russia, the People's Republic of China, Vietnam, these were all closed markets for us and in the last 25 years, for various reasons, they are now open markets for us, mass migration has played an important role in the globalization of our world and in make cultural awareness very, very important. I don't know if any of you have seen the movie Peggy Sue. They got married, it was in 1987, when you guys probably weren't even born, so Peggy Sue falls at her high school reunion and gets transported back in time or thinks she was transported back in time to her early high school years. from the 60s and she's talking to the school nerd about time travel and the guy's name is Richard and Richard is explaining his theory of time travel, which is Richards burrito, you know time bends one about the other one, but the funny thing is that he feels like he has to explain what a burrito is, so he starts telling Peggy, he says, well, a burrito was this and she says: I know what a burrito is, you know? ?

But in the early '60s, who knew what a burrito was? Who doesn't know what a burrito is? Nowadays, sophisticated communications, obviously. The Internet has facilitated instant communications around the world and this adds to the importance of cultural awareness. I think this cartoon does a good job of projecting how two different cultures come to the same conclusion but for very different reasons of course. we have the western woman here saying you know everything covered except her eyes, what a cruel culture dominated by men, and then you have the muslim woman here saying you have nothing covered except her eyes, what a cruel culture dominated by men. men.

I think it really does a good job of describing how in reality we are all the same but at the same time we are different. The Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede defined culture as the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes one category of people from another and I think that is a very good way to describe it because there are many different definitions of the impact of culture on buyer behavior, which which makes it absolutely essential for organizations to understand culture to be economically successful and these organizations need to develop separate personalized marketing programs if they want to reach their target audience and be economically viable why understanding cultural differences is so much more important than in the past?

Well, the stakes are high according to the US Department of Commerce. US global companies exported $2.3 trillion in goods in 2013 and that doesn't count the hundreds of billions of dollars in services that our companies have exported, it also estimates that 95 percent of American consumers live outside our borders and for every additional billion dollars of trade we have, it supports 5,000 additional jobs in the U.S. In fact, there is a lot in game. The due diligence process that companies must go through, you know, must include cultural awareness along with political, legal, economic and other considerations, and this is necessary for an organization to formulate a successful marketing strategy that must take .

Taking into account the values, labels, attitudes of your target audience and what happens if you are not successful, you will not be able to reach or attract your target audience, you will offend people, which in turn will damage your brand. and valuable time, resources and money are going to be wasted on what constitutes culture or what the indicators of culture are. Well, you have language, which is probably the most visible form of culture, so linguistic ties like Spanish, Spanish, formulate a Hispanic culture, Japanese. Korean Chinese formulate an Asian culture, so the language is very closely identified with the culture.

Religion defines many cultures and many Arabic-speaking countries identify with Islam, while Italy, France and Spain are associated with Roman Catholicism. Values ​​constitute an important part of culture. Some cultures highly value individualism. To think, while other cultures really admire conformity to a group and many European cultures highly value taking a long time to enjoy a good meal with lively conversation, whereas here in North America you know devouring a snack while surfing the Internet or watch YouTube. or checking your email it's not weird if I mention tempura sushi and Saki evokes a specific culture and a specific country if I tell you where Maria Vienna is schnitzel sauerkraut and apple strudel that reminds me of another culture and country and of course who can't know that . who introduced Big Macs and Twinkies hamburgers to the world the image in the left eye you guys okay we're approaching our time here in 2014 in 2002 the movie Scooby-Doo was released and this on the left was a promotional photo official of the film, when they went to market it in the Middle East, they were not allowed to use this until they retouched it, because many Islamic cultures disapprove or just outright prohibit skin being exposed on women and this is part of the culture, So these are some of the challenges that companies or organizations must take into account when they are going to market their products abroad.

Who does not recognize this right? Those of us who are old enough to have children. We have all purchased Gerber products and much more. familiar brand, but if you're not familiar with your market, things can go wrong. When Gerber moved to Africa, they did a very poor job of trying to gauge the culture of their target audience and they didn't know it in Africa due to low literacy rates. Companies often put up a picture of the ingredients contained inside the container, so the marketing department and management were surprised that sales were so slow until someone pointed out, you know, when some of these housewives are going down and a mother is going down. buy baby food, they're not going to buy a Gerber product because they think that's what's in the container.

Gerber is also Gerber's fault. Okay, Gerber has an unfortunate corporate name in some French-speaking cultures because Gerber is spelled exactly like Gerber. The French verbs jailbait and gell obey mean to vomit, so in certain French-speaking countries Gerber is under the corporate umbrella of Nestlé, it is understandable that another component of the culture has to do with values ​​and what certain cultures in China value well , they do not tolerate advertising that is Not true, in Germany it is illegal to criticize the competition or even imply that the competition's product is inferior. That's why when Toyota embarked on an advertising campaign in China, they thought they were being very clever and translated an old Chinese proverb, but they didn't do it well.

They didn't use InterPro translation solutions, it came out because on every road there is a Toyota and the Chinese government said you can't use this, it's not true, we can point out that not all Chinese roads have a Toyota driving it in Germany Goodyear wanted to advertise that their tires were stronger than the chains and showed that the chains broke and the government Germany did not allow it because it inferred that the quality of the German chains was poor, now this is after these companies spent millions and millions. of dollars in these campaigns, so if they had done a little research on cultural awareness beforehand, they would have understood that they couldn't have done that and would have done something different.

Hopefully, cultural awareness in our

globalized

world has prompted organizations to think about it in a new way, an example is breast cancer and the American Cancer Society, which runs many ads promoting that or advocating that mammograms will help combat cancer. breast cancer, so they have a lot of different ads and you've seen them all and you've seen the pink ribbons and they do a good job at it and one time they came up with a really cool concept in one of their ads and they wanted to implement it in two different languages ​​for North America and French for Quebec. into Spanish for both the US and Latin America, so it was difficult for them to do this.

Those of you who speak foreign languages ​​will understand and I will try to explain it to those who don't, but know that breast cancer itself is very easy to treat. translate you know in French it's hidden usana in Italian that's conquer that's a no it's very simple except when you go to a concept like this in English it's very easy to just block the R and the s to spell beat cancer this doesn't It doesn't work for other languages, so they have to think of a different way to project the same idea because they can't use this, you can't use this in French, you can't use this in Japanese, you can't use This is in Italian and I don't know if there is a language that you can use it in, but being able to adapt this message to a target audience has generated a new practice in the world and it is called trans creation, so like companies used to do it. translate your message from one language to another try to translate the word sum, which is very difficult.

We had a campaign that said "This is the new black" and it was going to Europe and we spent days trying to figure out how to do it so that companies You know, advertising agencies and translation companies no longer translate, they are trans creators and this really It opens up a new practice for many companies in the PR sector and in the translation sector, but it shows that our thinking is evolving a bit. Because of our interconnected and globalized world, research on the poor can be expensive, so it's great that companies do the research, but they have to do it right.

There was a fast food company and they did a study in Italy. I think it was in Milan and they wanted to open a new fast food facility in a high traffic area, so they did all the right things, they went, they hired a consulting company, they did the research, they said you know these three of these three locations , this is the one with the most traffic, this is where we want to build our new facility, they bought the land they bought, they built the building, they opened their doors and the sales were abysmal and no one can understand why we did everything right , what happened well.

They returned and saw that the traffic counts were accurate, except that all the cars were headed to a local brothel. The drivers didn't have fast food in mind, so it's very important that companies do research number one and do the research correctly. I'm going to end by saying that you know there are enough breakdowns in communications between the same cultures and but when As you try to communicate with different cultures the chances of miscommunication and harm multiply, but the point of what I would like to try to convey to all of you today is that cultural awareness is a critical component to being able to be successful in today's globalized world and Companies that forget or trivialize it will fail.

Thank you very much and go, Huskies.