A few years ago a fighter aircraft crashed near Canton, China and everyone onboard that plane died. When the Chinese Air force investigated the crash, they were stumped to find the cause. An audio clip extracted from the cockpit wreckage revealed that there was a major miscommunication between the pilot and the controller at the control tower, which was the reason for crash. The aircraft was a US make and was under a trial run by the air force. The pilot was Chinese, however the controller at the tower was an American, who was trying to warn the pilot that he was flying dangerously low because of which a problem had occurred and he needed to land immediately so he kept on shouting “pull up”. The pilot however thought he was being asked to fly higher so he “pulled the aircraft up”.
The incident clearly indicates that no matter how much we may be convinced that the world is becoming a global village and getting smaller, we cannot deny the fact that across different cultures, countries and continents, how people express themselves verbally, non verbally, through body language, and even in ways in which they interpret certain gestures or colors is very different. For example the flower chrysanthemum which is admired for its beauty world over is a symbol of death in Spain European(Poland. France) and Asian (Korea, Japan) countries. So we can expect some horrified looks if we present a white chrysanthemum bouquet to a French guy even though we may be totally unaware of the symbolism attached with that flower. Or for that matter in one particular case the ad campaign for a detergent brand failed miserably in the Middle East while it was a huge success everywhere else in the world. The ad agency was baffled about the possible cause of this disaster. On researching the whole issue they realized that the ads placed through billboards were interpreted incorrectly by the audience. In Islamic society people read from right to left unlike the rest of the world which reads from left to right. So they actually looked at the billboards from the section which was the last part. Viewing that billboard from left to right meant that a dirty shirt dipped in a bucket of that detergent was clean when taken out, but their interpretation was a clean shirt dipped in that detergent came out dirty. The ad agency’s lack of research and their assumption that people all over the world are essentially the same became the reason for the failure of an ad campaign which was a runaway success in other countries.
Many more such examples can be sighted which will testify this fact that communication becomes the key ingredient in the success or failure of any possible business deal, ad campaign or any other interaction which involves people of diverse backgrounds, culturally or even geographically. And this is become increasingly important in today’s business scenario which requires us to relocate to different geographical locations, interact with people of different cultures or simply working with a multiethnic workforce.
Which is why, companies across the globe today lay a very strong emphasis on designing neutral communication inside the organization. Talking about United States, today American companies have more women employees than ever before, a higher number of blacks and Mexicans, and a very large percentage of Asians which include Chinese, Japanese and Indians among others. So we can imagine that any message from the senior management to be cascaded down to the employees has to be designed in such a way that it doesn’t hurt the sensibilities of any particular community, religion or race.
Organizations are always trying to fill the gaps that arise out of communication or rather miscommunication due to misinterpretation. These gaps are more pronounced when we talk about interactions between East and West or native English speakers and non English speakers. It is very important for native English speakers to be sensitive to the fact that English is a foreign language for many of their counterparts around the world, and the extent to which it is understood and spoken may vary widely. For example, in some countries such as Japan, English is generally studied in junior high and high school, but the method of instruction emphasizes reading and grammar. Therefore, many Japanese may be more familiar with written English than spoken English. The Japanese are also very shy and hesitate to speak for fear of making a mistake. However, never make the assumption that a person does not understand English – it can cause embarrassing situations.Another factor to consider is that non-native English speakers around the world may be more familiar with British English than American English, or vice versa. The degree to which your colleagues speak English may also vary by region, occupation, educational background, amount of international exposure, etc. Native/bilingual English speakers should to learn to adjust the way that they speak when interacting with those who are less fluent in order to facilitate successful communication and prevent or minimize communication breakdowns.
Similarly when talking about the East West gap, Americans are less likely to pay attention to indirectness or hidden expressions and implied meanings often conveyed through body language, at work than in non-work envoirnments, these trends will not be apparent in East Asian contexts leading to a greater East–West cultural divide in work settings.
Academicians have categorized cultures into High context cultures and low context cultures for research purposes, but lot of our questions can be answered if we delve deeply into these. In high context cultures the meanings are expressed in physical context of interaction or are internalized in those participating in the interaction. In other words the meanings are often derived from non verbal cues, on the other hand, low context cultures rely more on specific and direct words for expressing.
The difference between high context cultures and low context cultures are many, for instance the importance of verbal messages in low context cultures is really high, secondly people from high context cultures consider the people form low context culture to be less credible, third, people form high context cultures are more skilled in reading non-verbal cues and they do not speak a lot and expect others to be equally skilled at taking non verbal cues.
Researchers have identified different styles of verbal communication across cultures: direct Vs indirect, elaborate Vs succinct etc. The direct style, which is used in western countries, involves use of explicit words and messages which clearly communicate the intentions, needs, wants of the person expressing. On the other hand in indirect styles there is more emphasis on non verbal expressions, implied meanings and hidden cues. This is more prevalent in Asian nations. For example rather than saying a flat no or showing direct disagreement, people in Asian cultures would prefer to say some thing like “I agree to you but we can look at alternative solutions as well”. Therefore two persons belonging to these two styles, conversing with each other might find it very difficult to understand each other or may often be victims of misinterpretations and miscommunication.
The dimension of elaborate succinct style deals with the richness or exactness or succinctness of the verbal expressions. For example many Middle Eastern cultures use the elaborate style. The Arab speakers use what appears to North Americans as exaggerated expressions, over-assertions, and repetitions. An implication for listening is that someone who is not aware of the Arabic verbal style could easily infer an incorrect meaning. In contrast to this Middle Eastern elaborateness the Chinese and Japanese styles are more succinct and crisp. The Japanese talk less and do not rely on expressed thoughts or feelings, considering these to be superficial and insincere. The Chinese verbal style is characterized by conveying a lot less than the actual. They often feel embarrassed when showered with praise and compliments which may affect one’s ability to respond to praise and compliment in a way that is expected in cultures that use the elaborate style.
These verbal styles are learned within cultural contexts of the users and therefore also reflect cultural values.
In essence we can say that even if we may accept a certain language as a universal language we can never truly understand and interpret messages and cues from our counterparts from other cultures which may not seem to be a very big challenge to us in the beginning but it certainly can pose a threat to our business relations and future multiethnic and multicultural collaborations. Hence it is very important to understand the importance of communication and lay strong emphasis on development of neutral communication styles. We should not only take into consideration, the sensibilities of different cultures but also try to avoid the temptation of tuning the message as per our styles and interpretation....
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Viral Marketing:Doing it differently
In 1999 a Hollywood movie “The Blair Witch Project” was released. The movie was a smashing hit with the highest cost to profit ratio ever. It is said to have earned approximately $10,000 for every dollar spent and featured in the Guinness Book of Records. This was quite a noteworthy achievement considering the fact that it was made at a total cost of just $35,000, it earned approximately $248 million.
Apart from the creative genius of the directors and the crew, the biggest reason for its success was the manner in which it was marketed. The movie was promoted as based on a true story and after its release the crew clarified that it isnt and is just a work of fiction. But the crew was so successful in placing it in the minds of its viewers in such a way that till date a lot of people still believe it to be true.
The film was marketed heavily via the Internet, and parts of the film were aired on TV as a series, leading to heated speculation on the internet as to whether the film was real or not. The teaser poster and other advertisements for the film were designed to reinforce that it is a documentary based on real footages, leading many people to think the film was an actual documentary, and that the three protagonists really had disappeared in the woods. To reinforce this idea, a TV channel aired a fake documentary, Curse of the Blair Witch,that claimed to investigate the Blair Witch legend before the film's release. It contained interviews with friends and relatives of the missing students, paranormal experts, and local historians (all fabricated). This was done so extensively that the three main actors were listed for a time as "missing, presumed dead" on IMDb website. While attending the Cannes Film Festival, the producers put up missing posters featuring the three stars of the films so that people could believe them to be real students who got lost while working on a project about the “Blair witch” and are now presumed dead. Even today the official website of the movie (http://www.blairwitch.com/) has sections which are dedicated to the story claiming it to be true and has pictures of the three “missing” film students and clips of the footage that was recovered about a year later after they went “missing”.
The producers and directors never expected it to do so well and were actually hoping it would make it as a TV release movie on cable TV.
The movie went on to become a source of a lot of debate and inspiration among the marketing fraternity for the unconventional methods used to promote it. And the reason was mainly that it was only the well thought out marketing strategy which made it the runaway success that it turned out to be. It is needless to say that had it all been done the usual way it would have failed to make a mark. It started a trend which has now become cult of sorts. This trend was the use of internet and other networking techniques to produced desired effects.
More recently the Barack Obama presidential campaign can be a very good example of how viral marketing is turning out to be an effective tool in marketing mainly because of its wide reach and low cost execution. The campaign has a social-networking site with powerful, instant peer-to-peer communication. It has features like "create your own event" and "create your own Obama group,". Obama HQ provides tools for these people to meet, organize, fund-raise and canvass voters. It however does not interfere with the communication within these groups and also doesnt dictate the content posted on the site. The chat rooms and events on barackobama.com, such as "Jazz Brunch for Obama Fundraiser," "Anime Fans for Obama" and "Barack the Kitchen Club," show the true potential of the viral branding. It can be rightly said that for the first time, the democratic power of the Internet has truly been harnessed in a presidential election campaign. Infact our Indian politicians can take a cue from Obama and take similar initiatives as it is a great way to involve the country's youth.
The term viral marketing used to denote marketing mainly through internet and was coined by a Harvard Business School professor, Jeffrey F. Rayport. Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use social and often unofficial networks to produce brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives through processes, which are very similar to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be done by word-of-mouth or enhanced by the effects of the Internet. Viral marketing facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily. Viral promotions can be in the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages.
It is a known fact that a satisfied customer tells an average of three people about a product or service he/she likes, and eleven people about a product or service which he/she did not like. The goal of marketers interested in creating successful viral marketing programs is to identify such individuals and events which will be able to create messages that appeal to this segment and have a high probability of being passed along. The driving force in any case would be the amount of curiosity that such messages generate. Are they interesting enough for people to go on reading the whole message and even pass it on to their peers is what drives the whole movement of passing it along.
If it works out then it is immensely powerful, usually having 500-1000 times greater impact than what we get from regular advertisements. If truly harnessed, this source can give us access to unlimited number of users in the form of bloggers, readers, viewers etc. And also this tool has an edge over other methods in terms of the cost involved as the cost of posting a viral message over the internet is very low as compared to placing an ad on television or even in magazines in certain cases. Going by that we can say that it is the future of marketing in the times to come as we see an explosion of internet users and mobile phone users and the growing popularity of blogs and social networking sites like Orkut and Facebook.
What is interesting is that more often than not such initiatives become like a movement or a cult with which people begin to associate themselves. For them it becomes more about their personality at times or about a cause close to their heart. Which explains why, after Blair witch project the internet was flooded with blogs about horror movies and real life supernatural events. Needless to say that the curiosity and the sense of association generated with it is mostly enough to take the campaign to the next level. As it brings like minded people together whose collective passion and zeal takes it forward. One person connects with the other and then a group forms and then two groups interact and a bigger group is formed. And all this happens without the company or the person who started this movement spending ridiculous amount of money as it happens in case of the conventional forms of marketing and promotions. It snow balls into something so big that advertisers swear they could never have created such an impact even if they employed their entire advertising arsenal.
Internet can become a powerful tool, not only to create a brand image but also to maintain it through constant feedback obtained in a matter of seconds. As global economics continue to cloud the future of the industry, the meltdown, will drive more money to the Internet—a much cheaper medium and has definitely more measurable reach and results.....
Apart from the creative genius of the directors and the crew, the biggest reason for its success was the manner in which it was marketed. The movie was promoted as based on a true story and after its release the crew clarified that it isnt and is just a work of fiction. But the crew was so successful in placing it in the minds of its viewers in such a way that till date a lot of people still believe it to be true.
The film was marketed heavily via the Internet, and parts of the film were aired on TV as a series, leading to heated speculation on the internet as to whether the film was real or not. The teaser poster and other advertisements for the film were designed to reinforce that it is a documentary based on real footages, leading many people to think the film was an actual documentary, and that the three protagonists really had disappeared in the woods. To reinforce this idea, a TV channel aired a fake documentary, Curse of the Blair Witch,that claimed to investigate the Blair Witch legend before the film's release. It contained interviews with friends and relatives of the missing students, paranormal experts, and local historians (all fabricated). This was done so extensively that the three main actors were listed for a time as "missing, presumed dead" on IMDb website. While attending the Cannes Film Festival, the producers put up missing posters featuring the three stars of the films so that people could believe them to be real students who got lost while working on a project about the “Blair witch” and are now presumed dead. Even today the official website of the movie (http://www.blairwitch.com/) has sections which are dedicated to the story claiming it to be true and has pictures of the three “missing” film students and clips of the footage that was recovered about a year later after they went “missing”.
The producers and directors never expected it to do so well and were actually hoping it would make it as a TV release movie on cable TV.
The movie went on to become a source of a lot of debate and inspiration among the marketing fraternity for the unconventional methods used to promote it. And the reason was mainly that it was only the well thought out marketing strategy which made it the runaway success that it turned out to be. It is needless to say that had it all been done the usual way it would have failed to make a mark. It started a trend which has now become cult of sorts. This trend was the use of internet and other networking techniques to produced desired effects.
More recently the Barack Obama presidential campaign can be a very good example of how viral marketing is turning out to be an effective tool in marketing mainly because of its wide reach and low cost execution. The campaign has a social-networking site with powerful, instant peer-to-peer communication. It has features like "create your own event" and "create your own Obama group,". Obama HQ provides tools for these people to meet, organize, fund-raise and canvass voters. It however does not interfere with the communication within these groups and also doesnt dictate the content posted on the site. The chat rooms and events on barackobama.com, such as "Jazz Brunch for Obama Fundraiser," "Anime Fans for Obama" and "Barack the Kitchen Club," show the true potential of the viral branding. It can be rightly said that for the first time, the democratic power of the Internet has truly been harnessed in a presidential election campaign. Infact our Indian politicians can take a cue from Obama and take similar initiatives as it is a great way to involve the country's youth.
The term viral marketing used to denote marketing mainly through internet and was coined by a Harvard Business School professor, Jeffrey F. Rayport. Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use social and often unofficial networks to produce brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives through processes, which are very similar to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be done by word-of-mouth or enhanced by the effects of the Internet. Viral marketing facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily. Viral promotions can be in the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages.
It is a known fact that a satisfied customer tells an average of three people about a product or service he/she likes, and eleven people about a product or service which he/she did not like. The goal of marketers interested in creating successful viral marketing programs is to identify such individuals and events which will be able to create messages that appeal to this segment and have a high probability of being passed along. The driving force in any case would be the amount of curiosity that such messages generate. Are they interesting enough for people to go on reading the whole message and even pass it on to their peers is what drives the whole movement of passing it along.
If it works out then it is immensely powerful, usually having 500-1000 times greater impact than what we get from regular advertisements. If truly harnessed, this source can give us access to unlimited number of users in the form of bloggers, readers, viewers etc. And also this tool has an edge over other methods in terms of the cost involved as the cost of posting a viral message over the internet is very low as compared to placing an ad on television or even in magazines in certain cases. Going by that we can say that it is the future of marketing in the times to come as we see an explosion of internet users and mobile phone users and the growing popularity of blogs and social networking sites like Orkut and Facebook.
What is interesting is that more often than not such initiatives become like a movement or a cult with which people begin to associate themselves. For them it becomes more about their personality at times or about a cause close to their heart. Which explains why, after Blair witch project the internet was flooded with blogs about horror movies and real life supernatural events. Needless to say that the curiosity and the sense of association generated with it is mostly enough to take the campaign to the next level. As it brings like minded people together whose collective passion and zeal takes it forward. One person connects with the other and then a group forms and then two groups interact and a bigger group is formed. And all this happens without the company or the person who started this movement spending ridiculous amount of money as it happens in case of the conventional forms of marketing and promotions. It snow balls into something so big that advertisers swear they could never have created such an impact even if they employed their entire advertising arsenal.
Internet can become a powerful tool, not only to create a brand image but also to maintain it through constant feedback obtained in a matter of seconds. As global economics continue to cloud the future of the industry, the meltdown, will drive more money to the Internet—a much cheaper medium and has definitely more measurable reach and results.....
Monologues of an academically challenged marketing enthusiast
well yes you read it right...i m academically challenged or rather i was..hated exams to the core but for some reason the marketing bug never left me...i carried it with form my B-school into an IT company and now i m spilling it all over the blog....
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