Adapting to cultural contexts is key

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When marketers take their brand positioning and messages global, a lot can be lost in translation. Although brands are thinking and behaving more globally than ever before, due to the connective tissue of digital, many are still repurposing communications for different geographies and cultures at the executional phase or with mere language translation.

However, as content becomes more portable, we must place a stronger emphasis on context, by strategically and creatively adapting communications and content for cultural relevance.

The same sharing pathways that made “What Does the Fox Say?” a global viral hit in 2013 can give consumers insight into how brands present themselves to different consumers across markets, which can pose an authenticity threat to marketers trying to create a consistent brand identity. After all, if you tell one story to a teenager in New York and a different story to a businesswoman in Shanghai, which of those stories can really be trusted?

To get to creative ideas that can live globally, advertisers can borrow from social psychology, which recognizes core variations between cultures that can help us understand what different people value, how they prefer to be communicated with and what cultural tensions can be tapped to create compelling stories. One framework for understanding these variations is social psychologist, professor and former IBM employee Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory, which lays out a set of cultural variables that can give insight into adjustments that can be made to bring a creative idea to life across cultures.

Here are four of those variables and how they can be applied to strategically adapt campaigns for audiences around the world.

Individualism vs. collectivism: Ads in individualist countries often celebrate people who achieve great things on their own or emphasize the importance of the individual over the group, while collectivist countries emphasize progressing together. A prime example of this dimension at play in global advertising can be found in Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign. Unlike its “Sketches” execution in the U.S., which asked women to see the beauty in themselves, Dove ran a series of print ads in China, a market more oriented toward collectivism, that featured pregnant women with their bellies intricately covered in calligraphy with questions for society as a whole—”If you knew I’d grow up to weigh 140 jin [154 pounds], would I still be your baby?” The reemphasis of the creative idea prevents it from being only about the individual.

Being vs. doing orientation: In doing-oriented cultures, there’s a strong tension between being successful and enjoying life that advertisers often leverage to create desirability for their products. When Johnnie Walker brought its iconic “Keep Walking” campaign, which features ideas about progress and success, to Brazil—a culture less focused on personal achievement and progress than the U.S. and Western Europe—the image used was not of an ambitious young man, but rather the nation as a whole. Johnnie Walker avoided the stigma against careerism and ambition that can be present in cultures more oriented toward “being” than “doing.”

High context vs. low context: This describes communication between people, and how much meaning is carried tacitly by their relationship or context to an ad’s theme or subject. In high-context cultures (e.g., Japan and Korea), sensitive subjects like conflict or sex must be dealt with less directly. This becomes clear when you look at brands that use sex to sell in markets where context is higher—brands like Axe/Lynx dial down the overt sexuality and dial up the subtext of their branding in order to maintain respectability in markets that appreciate subtlety.

Uncertainty avoidance: High-uncertainty avoidance cultures often emphasize the risks of not using a product versus the possibilities of using it. This dynamic can be seen with Airbnb’s first few forays into advertising under the “Belong Anywhere” campaign. The first spot, called “Views,” is very much about possibilities, evoking the many views you might see from the window of your Airbnb rental. The second spot, “Welcome to Airbnb,” is much more explicit about the rental process, describing the steps a renter undergoes to find the perfect rental at the perfect price.

Each ad performs a clear role in the overall idea. The first speaks about possibilities to people who are comfortable with uncertainty, and the second speaks about realities to people who fear it, all under the same overall idea of belonging anywhere. Portugal, Greece and Japan are a few examples of countries that are highly avoidant of uncertainty. Singapore, Scandinavia, and Hong Kong are a few examples of regions more tolerant of uncertainty.

By tapping into these truths, and combining them with social listening to cultural cues, we can evaluate and develop communications and content that resonate across cultures.

Only then will the world be ours.

Original article published here: ADWEEK

What the World Will Speak in 2115

A century from now, expect fewer but simpler languages on every continent

It isn’t an accident that the Bible’s tale of the Tower of Babel presents multilingualism as a divine curse meant to hinder our understanding.
It isn’t an accident that the Bible’s tale of the Tower of Babel presents multilingualism as a divine curse meant to hinder our understanding.In 1880 a Bavarian priest created a language that he hoped the whole world could use. He mixed words from French, German and English and gave his creation the name Volapük, which didn’t do it any favors. Worse, Volapük was hard to use, sprinkled with odd sounds and case endings like Latin.

It made a splash for a few years but was soon pushed aside by another invented language, Esperanto, which had a lyrical name and was much easier to master. A game learner could pick up its rules of usage in an afternoon.

But it didn’t matter. By the time Esperanto got out of the gate, another language was already emerging as an international medium: English. Two thousand years ago, English was the unwritten tongue of Iron Age tribes in Denmark. A thousand years after that, it was living in the shadow of French-speaking overlords on a dampish little island. No one then living could have dreamed that English would be spoken today, to some degree, by almost two billion people, on its way to being spoken by every third person on the planet.

Science fiction often presents us with whole planets that speak a single language, but that fantasy seems more menacing here in real life on this planet we call home—that is, in a world where some worry that English might eradicate every other language. That humans can express themselves in several thousand languages is a delight in countless ways; few would welcome the loss of this variety.


YAREK WASZUL

But the existence of so many languages can also create problems: It isn’t an accident that the Bible’s tale of the Tower of Babel presents multilingualism as a divine curse meant to hinder our understanding. One might even ask: If all humans had always spoken a single language, would anyone wish we were instead separated now by thousands of different ones?

Thankfully, fears that English will become the world’s only language are premature. Few are so pessimistic as to suppose that there will not continue to be a multiplicity of nations and cultures on our planet and, along with them, various languages besides English. It is difficult, after all, to interrupt something as intimate and spontaneous as what language people speak to their children. Who truly imagines a Japan with no Japanese or a Greece with no Greek? The spread of English just means that earthlings will tend to use a local language in their own orbit and English for communication beyond.

But the days when English shared the planet with thousands of other languages are numbered. A traveler to the future, a century from now, is likely to notice two things about the language landscape of Earth. One, there will be vastly fewer languages. Two, languages will often be less complicated than they are today—especially in how they are spoken as opposed to how they are written.

Some may protest that it is not English but Mandarin Chinese that will eventually become the world’s language, because of the size of the Chinese population and the increasing economic might of their nation. But that’s unlikely. For one, English happens to have gotten there first. It is now so deeply entrenched in print, education and media that switching to anything else would entail an enormous effort. We retain the QWERTY keyboard and AC current for similar reasons.

Also, the tones of Chinese are extremely difficult to learn beyond childhood, and truly mastering the writing system virtually requires having been born to it. In the past, of course, notoriously challenging languages such as Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Arabic, Russian and even Chinese have been embraced by vast numbers of people. But now that English has settled in, its approachability as compared with Chinese will discourage its replacement. Many a world power has ruled without spreading its language, and just as the Mongols and Manchus once ruled China while leaving Chinese intact, if the Chinese rule the world, they will likely do so in English.

A Chinese teacher gives an English lesson to students in the Gansu province of northwest China in July 2013. Some have predicted that Mandarin Chinese will eventually become the world’s language, but its elaborate tones are too difficult to learn beyond childhood.
A Chinese teacher gives an English lesson to students in the Gansu province of northwest China in July 2013. Some have predicted that Mandarin Chinese will eventually become the world’s language, but its elaborate tones are too difficult to learn beyond childhood.

Yet more to the point, by 2115, it’s possible that only about 600 languages will be left on the planet as opposed to today’s 6,000. Japanese will be fine, but languages spoken by smaller groups will have a hard time of it. Too often, colonialization has led to the disappearance of languages: Native speakers have been exterminated or punished for using their languages. This has rendered extinct or moribund, for example, most of the languages of Native Americans in North America and Aboriginal peoples of Australia. Urbanization has only furthered the destruction, by bringing people away from their homelands to cities where a single lingua franca reigns.

Even literacy, despite its benefits, can threaten linguistic diversity. To the modern mind, languages used in writing, with its permanence and formality, seem legitimate and “real,” while those that are only spoken—that is, all but a couple hundred of them today—can seem evanescent and parochial. Few illusions are harder to shed than the idea that only writing makes something “a language.” Consider that Yiddish is often described as a “dying” language at a time when hundreds of thousands of people are living and raising children in it—just not writing it much—every day in the U.S. and Israel.

It is easy for speakers to associate larger languages with opportunity and smaller ones with backwardness, and therefore to stop speaking smaller ones to their children. But unless the language is written, once a single generation no longer passes it on to children whose minds are maximally plastic, it is all but lost. We all know how much harder it is to learn a language well as adults.

In a community where only older people now speak a language fluently, the task is vastly more difficult than just passing on some expressions, words and word endings. The Navajo language made news recently when a politician named Chris Deschene was barred from leading the Navajo nation because his Navajo isn’t fluent. One wishes Mr. Deschene well in improving his Navajo, but he has a mountain to climb. In Navajo there is no such thing as a regular verb: You have to learn by heart each variation of every verb. Plus it has tones.

That’s what indigenous languages tend to be like in one way or another. Languages “grow” in complexity the way that people pick up habits and cars pick up rust. One minute the way you mark a verb in the future tense is to use will: I will buy it. The next minute, an idiom kicks in where people say I am going to buy it, because if you are going with the purpose of doing something, it follows that you will. Pretty soon that gels into a new way of putting a verb in the future tense with what a Martian would hear as a new “word,” gonna.

In any language that kind of thing is happening all the time in countless ways, far past what is necessary even for nuanced communication. A distinction between he and she is a frill that most languages do without, and English would be fine without gonna alongside will, irregular verbs and much else.

These features, like he versus she, certainly don’t hurt anything. A language isn’t something that can be trimmed like a bush, and children have no trouble picking up even the weirdest of linguistic frills. A “click” language of southern Africa typically has not just two or three but as many as dozens of different clicks to master (native speakers have a bump on their larynx from producing them 24/7). For English speakers, it seems hard enough that Mandarin Chinese requires you to distinguish four tones to get meaning across, but in the Hmong languages of Southeast Asia, any syllable means different things according to as many as eight tones.

But the very things that make these languages so fabulously rich also makes it hard to revive them once lost—it’s tough to learn hard stuff when you’re grown, busy and self-conscious. There are diligent efforts to keep various endangered languages from dying, but the sad fact is that few are likely to lead to communities raising children in the language, which is the only way a language exists as its full self.

Instead, many communities, passing their ancestral language along by teaching it in school and to adults, will create new versions of the languages, with smaller vocabularies and more streamlined grammars. The Irish Gaelic proudly spoken by today’s English-Gaelic bilinguals is an example, something one might call a “New Gaelic.” New versions of languages like this will be part of a larger trend, growing over the past few millennia in particular: the birth of languages less baroquely complicated than the linguistic norm of the premodern world.

The first wave in this development occurred when technology began to allow massive, abrupt population transfers. Once large numbers of people could cross an ocean at one time, or be imported by force into a territory, a new language could end up being learned by hordes of adults instead of by children. As we know from our experiences in the classroom, adults aren’t as good at mastering the details of a language as toddlers are, and the result was simpler languages.

Vikings, for example, invaded England starting in the eighth century and married into the society. Children in England, hearing their fathers’ “broken” Old English in a time when schooling was limited to elites and there was no media, grew up speaking that kind of English, and the result was what I am writing now. Old English bristled with three genders, five cases and the same sort of complex grammar that makes modern German so difficult for us, but after the Vikings, it morphed into modern English, one of the few languages in Europe that doesn’t assign gender to inanimate objects. Mandarin, Persian, Indonesian and other languages went through similar processes and are therefore much less “cluttered” than a normal language is.

The second wave of simplification happened when a few European powers transported African slaves to plantations or subjected other people to similarly radical displacements. Adults had to learn a language fast, and they learned even less of it than Vikings did of English—often just a few hundred words and some scraps of sentence structure. But that won’t do as a language to fully live in, and so they expanded these fundamentals into brand-new languages. Now these languages can express any nuance of human thought, but they haven’t existed long enough to also dangle unnecessary things like willfully irregular verbs. These are called Creole languages.

It’s far easier to manage a basic conversation in a Creole than in an older language. Haitian Creole, for example, is a language low on the complications that make learning Navajo or Hmong so tough. It spares a student from having to know that boats are male and tables are female, which is one of the reasons that it’s so hard to master French, the language from which it got most of its words.

Creole languages were created world-wide during the era that the textbooks call Western “exploration.” African soldiers created an Arabic Creole in Sudan; orphans created a German one in New Guinea. Aboriginal Australians created an English Creole, which was passed on to surrounding locations such as, again, New Guinea, where under the name Tok Pisin it is today the language of government for people speaking hundreds of different native languages. Jamaican patois, South Carolina’s Gullah and Cape Verdean are other examples.

YAREK WASZUL

Modern population movements are now creating a third wave of language streamlining. In cities world-wide, children of immigrants speaking many different languages are growing up speaking among themselves a version of their new country’s language that nibbles away at such arbitrary features as irregular verbs and gendered objects. It’s a kind of compromise between the original version of the language and the way their parents speak it.

Linguists have no single term yet for these new speech varieties, but from Kiezdeutsch in Germany to “Kebob Norsk” in Norway, from the urban Wolof of Senegal to Singapore’s “Singlish,” the world is witnessing the birth of lightly optimized versions of old languages. These will remain ways of speaking that are rarely committed to the page. Yet as we know from languages like Yiddish, this will hardly disqualify them as thriving human languages.

This streamlining should not be taken as a sign of decline. All of the “optimized” languages remain full languages in every sense of the term, as we know from the fact that I’m writing in one: An Old English speaker who heard modern English would consider it confounding and “broken.” That any language has all irregular verbs, eight tones or female tables is ultimately a matter of accident, not design.

Hopefully, the languages lost amid all of this change will at least be described and, with modern tools, recorded for posterity. We may regret the eclipse of a world where 6,000 different languages were spoken as opposed to just 600, but there is a silver lining in the fact that ever more people will be able to communicate in one language that they use alongside their native one.

After all, what’s peculiar about the Babel tale is the idea of linguistic diversity as a curse, not the idea of universal comprehension as a blessing. The future promises both a goodly amount of this diversity and ever more mutual comprehension, as many languages become easier to pick up, in their spoken versions, than they once were. A future dominated by English won’t be a linguistic paradise, in short, but it won’t be a linguistic Armageddon either.

Original article published here: The Wall Street Journal

Language learning: what motivates us?

LAST week’s Johnson column celebrated “National Grammar Day” with some thorny grammatical issues: the uses of which versus that, the plural of words borrowed from foreign languages and how to handle one of those things that drive(s) me crazy. All defy attempts to impose hard-and-fast rules, because perfectly good grammar (as practised by the best English writers) points in more than one direction.

This is not to say “do what you feel”. Standard English really does have rules. National Grammar Day types often focus on uninteresting simple ones like the distinction betweenthey’re and their. But the hard stuff is more interesting. A few bits of grammar in standard written English are tricky even for experienced writers and fluent speakers. Perhaps one of the most common problems is the one commonly called “hypercorrective whom”. For this columnist, it really is a mistake.

Poor whom. Not only is mastery of whom scarce; use of whom is in decline, full stop. (Google’s book-search tool provides a striking visual.) Whom is one of the few remaining vestiges of Old English’s rich case system. Since only whom and a few other words (I/me, he/him etc) show case, English-speakers rarely have occasion to think about the matter.

Nonetheless, good writers should master whom: edited prose with who in a place where the objective case (whom) is expected will strike an educated and careful reader as wrong. But worse—as with between you and I—is “hypercorrecting”: using whom in the wrong places. Nathan Heller, who called the who/whom distinction “glorious” and “simple” in a New Yorkerbook review criticising Steven Pinker, himself made a classic whom hypercorrection in another article:

   But what about Sir Isaac Newton, whom some contend was autistic?

That should be who some contend was autistic. But the sentence made it past the New Yorker’s famously zealous copy team. That is because the syntax is a lot like variants where whom would be correct:

   (1) Isaac Newton, whom some consider autistic

Then again, these phrases are also grammatically accurate:

   (2) Isaac Newton, who some contend was autistic

   (3) Isaac Newton, who some say was autistic

   (4) Isaac Newton, who some think was autistic        

The difference can be hard to spot for those unused to parsing or disagramming sentences. A relative clause is like a sentence: it has a subject, and may also have an object. Verbs that take direct objects are called transitive, and consider is transitive:

    Some[subject] consider him[object] autistic

When this goes into a relative clause, the him keeps its case, becoming whom:

    Newtonwhom[object] some[subject] consider autistic

But examples 2-4 have a twisty syntax. The main verb is was, not contend, say or think. The subject of was is who (ie, Newton).

So what are some say and some think doing there? The sentence

    Some contend he was autistic

is simple enough. But when it becomes a relative clause in a longer sentence, the word order moves around to

    who some contend was autistic

It is a kind of recursive structure. The relative clause conveys a sentence, Some think he was autistic, which itself contains a sentence, he was autistic. But in the relative clause, Newton (who) jumps out of the inner sentence and becomes the subject of the whole thing. [some say] and [some contend] can now be considered in mental brackets. They are no longer the star of the show, the grammatical subject. Newton is: the main verb of the relative clause is was, not contend. Therefore its subject is who, meaning Newton. Though the word order has changed in our relative clause, the case of who should not: it is the same as he.

Another way of putting it is to note that unlike considercontend is intransitive: it does not take a direct object. (You can say she considered him autistic but not she contended him autistic.) If contend can’t take him, it can’t take whom. What is confusing is that contenddoes take a clause that completes its meaning:

   Some contend that Newton was autistic.

Because the clause complementing contend looks a bit like a direct object, whom is tempting. But wrong.

Descriptive linguists have shown that whom in a subject role is certainly out there, and so some fight shy of calling it a mistake. Shakespeare used it at least five times. But “Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage”, exploring the mess, has just a thin list of examples post-Shakespeare, the likes of This Week Mag, Esquire and one from the New York Times. This is not one of those cases where the excellent researchers at Merriam-Webster can comprehensively beat back a “zombie rule” by showing that it has been ignored in an unbroken chain by great writers over the centuries. Support for subject-whom is too thin to justify rethinking the traditional rule. It will be considered a mistake by most of the people who think about this kind of thing. Writers should avoid it.

What Johnson likes about this case is that it really requires an understanding of some syntax: what a relative clause is (eg, “whom some consider autistic”), the cases and their roles (I, he and who versus me, him and whom), and verbs that take a direct object (consider) versus those that take a clause (contend). To understand this requires going past superficial rules to understanding the plumbing. It’s the kind of thing real grammarians delight in and debate, and so much more interesting than all the shibboleth-fondling over the likes of your versus you’re.

Original article published here: Economist.com