Cultural differences in marketing

Why tailoring your marketing efforts is essential for your business

I have been living in the U.S. for almost 18 years. Even though I was born in Brazil, I have always identified with the American culture more than my own. I watched football (the American kind) and baseball as a kid, laughed at Married with Children and Seinfeld and have always been fascinated with U.S. TV commercials and movies. I founded Different Perspective 13 years ago because I noticed foreign companies were lost when they tried to reach the American audience — they were simply translating their efforts and hoping the message was clear and concise.
Language shouldn’t be the main focus when creating an advertising campaign. With technology nowadays, you can read, write and even speak in languages you didn’t even know existed. Culture can’t be learned online — it needs to be lived, constantly. That’s why businesses must learn to adapt cultural differences in their marketing to fit the audience they’re trying to reach.
Many companies from overseas approach us. We work with businesses from Ecuador, South Africa, England, Australia, as well as Brazil, to name a few, to promote their services and products to the U.S. market. These companies decided to work with us because they realized that advertising is not universal. You may have a global company, but you must think local when it comes to promotion. Simply translating copy not only often doesn’t make sense, but it can very easily miss the mark completely and fail to get your point across. This can waste thousands of dollars and even worse, a lot of time. At Different Perspective, our diverse team is fully immersed into the American culture. And because some of us are foreigners, we can quickly adapt to our international clients’ method of communication and understand their struggles of breaking into a new market.
We are able to reposition our clients’ message to reach their audience in the U.S. because this is something we had to go through both personally and professionally. We understand that research and local knowledge is essential. For example, in Florida, there are 67 counties, three of which are dry — they don’t allow the sale of any alcoholic beverage. To many international cultures, the idea of a dry county is completely alien! A foreign company with a great beer to promote could spend a lot of money and time, only to eventually find out they can’t sell their product in these 3 counties.
Anyone can do research, but you can save lots of hours when you combine data with experience. As a company, we don’t take anything for granted since we have probably made the same mistakes in the past.
Hiring a company in your own country to market to a different audience can be a painful mistake and one that can bury your chances of succeeding in an already highly competitive market.
Don’t try to do it all yourself either. Hire marketing professionals to tell your story to the right people in the right way, and you can devote your time to doing what you do best — growing your business. Peace of mind is inexpensive when compared to wasted money and time. We can help — contact us to learn more.
 
This blog was written by our Founder and President Hugo Azzolini.