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“What culture lacks is the taste for anonymous, innumerable germination. Culture is smitten with counting and measuring; it feels out of place and uncomfortable with the innumerable; its efforts tend, on the contrary, to limit the numbers in all domains; it tries to count on its fingers.” - Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985), French sculptor, painter.

In This Issue:

Regular Weekly Columns:

• Recent Get International Clients Blog Topics
• Foreign Trivia
• Example Of Websites With Global Business
• Q & A
• Are You Missing International Business Opportunities?

This Weeks Feature Article:

Online Marketing With 5 Different Cultural Behavior Values
Uncertainty – Avoidance
Part 2 of 5

 

 

 

Recent Get International Clients Blog Topics

• Website Design – Don’t Get Off On The Wrong Foot
• Why You Need To Know Your Clients Expectations Before You Outsource Your Customer Support Overseas
• How To Use International Marketing Strategy To Plan For Your Globalized Website
• How Quickly Do You Need To Get A Globalized Website?
• Insights Into Cost Effective Video Marketing For International Markets

Read more on www.getinternationalclients.com

Foreign Trivia

If you are in Estonia, which currency do you need to have to use?

Send your answers to cindy@cindyking.biz with “Foreign Trivia” in the subject line.

Answer to last week’s trivia question: Which day of the year is Europe Day celebrated? May 9th

Feature Article

Online Marketing With 5 Different Cultural Behavior Values

Uncertainty – Avoidance

Part 2 of 5

We are spending 5 weeks looking at five different ways to approach cultural marketing.This will give you better insights into how you can integrate cross cultural marketing into your internet marketing practices to get more international sales.As we said last week, cultural researchers refer to different behavioral values in different cultures. Geert Hofstede researched this a few decades ago.And these different behavioral values are outlined in many reference books. They are also outlined in the book The Culturally Customized Web Site by Nitish Singh and Arun Pereira. I wrote a review of this book recently on www.CindyKing.biz.

The 5 Different Cultural Behavior Values

Different cultures can be measured along 5 different scales:

• High Individualism versus High Collectivism Behavior
• High versus Low Uncertainty Avoidance Behavior
• High versus Low Power Distance Behavior
• High Masculinity versus High Femininity Behavior
• High versus Low Context Behavior

These different behavior scales can be used by international internet marketers.

Inspiration To Market To Different Cultures

Marketing towards these behavioral needs gives internet marketers tools to play with and tweak to get better responses from different countries and cultures.

This is especially helpful, if you are marketing to another country at the opposite end of one or more of these scales to your country.

And Only Inspiration

It is important to understand that these scales cannot give you a cookie cutter strategy. This does not mean you must through all of your good marketing practices to the wind and start all over again.

They are useful to show you what you should try emphasizing in your online marketing.

If you think your cross cultural marketing is not speaking to your foreign market, or if you would like to improve your cross cultural communication, have a quick look at each of these behavioral traits to see the differences between you and your foreign market.

Last week we looked at Individualism versus Collectivism in cultural behavior.

This week we will look at what is referred to as uncertainty avoidance.

Uncertainty Avoidance

On one end of the scale there are countries where the cultures tend towards a society of high uncertainty avoidance. These cultures place a high value on predictability, structure and order.

On the other end of the scale there are countries where people tend towards a society of low uncertainty avoidance. These cultures are more willing to take risk, they need less structure and can handle ambiguity well.

High Uncertainty Avoidance

Here are some countries considered to be high on the Uncertainty Avoidance scale:

• Greece
• Portugal
• Guatemala
• Uruguay
• El Salvador
• Belgium
• Japan
• Peru
• Spain
• Panama
• France

Low Uncertainty Avoidance

Here are some countries considered to be low on the Uncertainty Avoidance scale:

• Singapore
• Jamaica
• Denmark
• Hong Kong
• Sweden
• Ireland
• UK
• Malaysia
• China
• India
• USA

Emphasize The Right Online Marketing Tools

Each country has a unique cultural blend of all five of the different cultural behaviors.

But you can still study each one of these individual cultural behaviors to identify the right mixture of things to emphasize in your foreign market.

It is interesting to look at the differences in your cultural behaviors when developing your international internet marketing plan.

Examples Of Tools To Use Online For High Uncertainty Avoidance

Here is a list of tools you could use for countries high on the scale of Uncertainty Avoidance. Remember it is not only having this tool on your website it is also how it is emphasized that counts.

Provide Expert Advice

• Create perception of expert status of key company executives by providing links to their blogs
• Customer Service contact, help, availability
• FAQs

Make Them Feel At Home

• Good website navigation
• Give addresses of local offices
• Use the exact same language and style of speech as they use

Provide Reasons For Them To Trust You

• Free trials
• Testimonials
• Trust enhancing features

Countries With Low Uncertainty Avoidance Scores

There are no special tools to emphasize for countries that score low on the Uncertainty Avoidance scale. You need to look at their scores on the other four behaviors to find the right tools to emphasize.

Cultural Behavioral Research Helps Online Marketing

The research done in cultural behavioral values has helped traditional international marketing. Internet marketers can also use this research to help develop their international markets.

There are often ways and formats of communicating online towards each behavioral value.

Easy testing and tracking gives internet marketing more scope to refine different cultural approaches and improve international results.

Spend a little time surfing on websites from countries with different placements on the individualism and collectivism scale. Even if you do not speak the language you can often get a feel for the style of communication.

Next week we will look at the second behavioral trait: High versus Low Power Distance Behavior

Example Of Websites With Global Business

It can be daunting when starting out. How do you go about creating a good global website and then culturally customized websites?

There are many steps a company takes to become totally international.

To give you an idea of what is recognized as a global website, have a look at another company website:

www.nivea.com

Nivea comes in the 19th position for best global website of 2008 in John Yunker’s report.

This page has an interesting combination of a world map with geographic tags in English placed on the map. There is a scroll down list of countries listed in both English and the native language.

It is interesting to compare a variety of the localized country websites. The main template is used on all of the websites. But you can see slight variations between countries. There appears to be one main template with a choice in sub-templates used on the country websites. There also appears to be one main set of photos used throughout together with a few sub-sets of photos.

The main page also leads to an International Website.

Overall, the Nivea website is a fine example of the use of templates. It is easy to get to the country you want and there is a vast choice of languages.

The one downside? And it is a big one. On the day I looked at this website and digging further into the website, I found the loading times were so slow I did not wait for them to come up. This actually happened over many different attempts.

John Yunker researches and publishes a list of the best globalized websites.

Q And A

Question: Why should you want international clients?

Answer: This was an interesting question that came up recently.

There are those who are totally driven by the idea of creating a worldwide company. And then there are others who need reasons.

I’ll only give you one observation here. It often appears to me that companies only really appreciate the value of international clients when the going gets very tough in their domestic markets.

This is something I have experienced first hand.

International sales were needed to make a product range profitable. Until then international sales were considered icing on the cake. A product unexpectedly lost money on domestic sales and the international sales saved the day. This gave everyone time to respond and make better decisions.

International sales can only really save you from a bad domestic economy if you have the international sales structure and knowledge base in place.

Most people think of the prestigious aspect to be able to say you are an international company. But the real value is in learning how you products are used and appreciated in other cultures. This helps you to get better at what you do best back home.

Different cultures will always have a different take on your products and services. If you fully understand this for all of the different countries you sell to you can actually improve your own sales pitch, your sales processes and strategies.

It’s not only the extra clients and money you can get for your business. It’s also about what the extra markets out there can teach you about your business.

Read more on Get International Clients.

If you have a question on how to get more international clients, leave your question at cindy@cindyking.biz .

Are You Missing International Business Opportunities?

King Business Tools makes International Communication Affordable even for Small Businesses

Stop missing opportunities! King Business Tools’ Monthly International Content Creation Packages integrates Internet and Traditional Marketing Strategies for international lead generation. We provide companies like yours with an affordable way to create a business presence in foreign markets fast. Or are you unsure of the opportunities you are missing? Do you need ideas? If you need help in defining how to focus your international business expansion, sign up for a 39 point international analysis of your current internet presence and get an hours live phone session with the King Business Tools Idea Factory.The International Business Idea Factory run by King Business Tools covers expertise in North American and European business expansion. Get started today — contact me at: cindy@cindyking.biz or +33 6 98 91 86 11 Contact me now to learn more about how I can help you Generate More International Leads For You Today.Cindy King is based just south of Paris, she runs King Business Tools, a French Company, to provide European and North American companies.

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