Crossing the Line: Avoiding the Faux Pas of Global Communications
By Gary Ferraro

Like it or not, the new millennium has ushered in vast changes. Rapid technological developments in transportation and communications in recent decades have brought the peoples of the world closer together in ways that we could barely imagine just a decade ago. We are living in a world where a single computer is made in seven different countries, where many U.S. companies have moved their accounting and customer service operations to India or the Philippines, and where a growing number of the world's population is electronically connected through the internet. Globalization is no longer just a meaningless buzzword. We are up to our eyeballs in the global economy. Are you ready to negotiate, market, and sell your products all over the world? You can bet your competitors are. If you are not, you will surely be left behind.

Manufacturers' success depends on how well they can exercise professional skills in varied cultural settings. Studies show overseas business failures result from an inability to understand foreign ways of thinking and acting, not from technical or professional incompetence. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of examples of business miscues when Americans manufacture, negotiate and market in a multicultural environment. Some are mildly amusing. Others are downright embarrassing. But all of them, to one degree or another, have been costly in terms of money and reputation.

Scenario #1:
You are representing your manufacturing firm at a trade show in Hong Kong. You and your two assistants are wearing green baseball caps with your company's logo on the front. You have a number of these caps you are giving away to those who visit your booth. But very few people are stopping to talk, and those who do are refusing the free cap. How can you explain this unanticipated poor response at the trade show? Unfortunately, you failed to understand the Chinese expression "He wears a green hat" conveys the meaning that a man's wife or girlfriend has been unfaithful. Clearly no self-respecting Chinese man would walk around wearing a green hat. Bad choice of color!

Scenario #2:
You are meeting with the CEO of a Japanese firm to discuss the possibilities of a joint manufacturing venture between your two companies. The Japanese executive, who speaks very good English, is making a very reasonable presentation on what his company has to offer the joint project. Although you like what he is saying, you are becoming increasingly annoyed with his constant pausing to ask if you understand what he is saying. Does the Japanese CEO think you are too stupid to understand? Actually, no. The misunderstanding occurred because the role of the listener in Japan is quite different from that in the United States. It is customary in Japan for listeners to use certain replies (called aizuchi) such as "hai" ("yes") signaling that one is both listening and understanding. Americans also do this by saying "yes" or grunting "umhum," but much less frequently. Because you were not giving any aizuchi, the Japanese CEO kept seeking reassurance that his message was getting across. Again, this cross-cultural misunderstanding could have been avoided had you done your homework.

Scenario #3:
While shopping in your town in South Carolina, you run into one of your employees, a recent immigrant from Thailand, along with her husband and 11-year-old daughter. While being introduced to your employee's family, you greet the daughter by patting her on the head. The parents look startled and quickly leave. You are not sure what you did that may have offended them. In Thailand, the head is considered to be the most sacred part of the body, where a person's soul resides. While patting an American child on the head is viewed as an endearing gesture, in Thailand it is a violation of the most sacred part of a person's body. Again, you have committed an unintentional, yet nevertheless costly, cultural gaffe.

Funny, but Costly

When marketing abroad, we all too often assume that if our strategies and slogans work well at home, they will be equally effective in other parts of the world. But problems can arise when changing cultural contexts. To illustrate, when Pepsi Cola decided to export its highly successful slogan "Come alive with Pepsi" to Southeast Asia, the only way it could be translated was "Pepsi brings your dead ancestors back from the grave." A U.S. owned airline offering service to Brazil advertised their comfortable "rendezvous lounges" on their 747s, without realizing the word "rendezvous" in Portuguese refers to a place for illicit sexual encounters. Moreover, chicken entrepreneur Frank Purdue decided to translate one of his very successful advertising slogans into Spanish, but the new slogan didn't produce the desired results. The slogan "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken" was translated into Spanish as "It takes a virile man to make a chicken affectionate." And the slogan of the American Dairy Association, "Got Milk?" was interpreted in parts of South America as "Are you lactating?" While all of these marketing miscues got a lot of laughs locally, they cost these companies millions of dollars in lost revenues, as well as a loss of product credibility.

These are but a few examples of the high price we can pay for miscalculating, or simply ignoring, the cultural dimension of doing business in a global economy. Business literature is filled with many other costly miscues. What can we learn from these negative case studies? Put simply, we can no longer afford to ignore the cultures of those countries in which we have ongoing business interests. This is becoming more urgent each day as the world's economies become increasingly more interdependent. The good news is that all of these costly global miscues could have been avoided with the proper cross-cultural training. When it comes to avoiding those cultural gaffes that can be devastating to a company's bottom line, recognizing they are easy to make is half the battle. The other half requires careful preparation in understanding how cultural differences can impact employee relations, organizational efficiency, marketing strategies, and international negotiations. Studies over the past several decades have all shown a consistently positive relationship between cross cultural training and job performance, self-confidence, team building skills, adjustment to new environments, and accurate cross-cultural perceptions. Whether you are manufacturing abroad, employing a multicultural workforce at home, marketing internationally, or negotiating with global customers or suppliers, the more you know about the values and assumptions of culturally different people, the more successful you will be in navigating the tricky currents of global business.

Gary Ferraro, a cross-cultural trainer and consultant for a number of multinational companies, is a professor emeritus of cultural anthropology at UNC Charlotte and the author of The Cultural Dimension of International Business (5th Edition, 2006) and Global Brains (2002). He can be reached at 704-335-8918 or ferrlass@bellsouth.net.