From Wikideas1 - Own work, 2017 World population, from http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-country/
This week’s readings – four chapters (including one we had already read) from International Public Relations: Negotiating Culture, Identity, and Power plus four case studies from a larger selection of international case studies – were not only interesting, but also drove home a point that has come up week after week. That is, no culture or public or agency is monolithic.
Curtin and Gaither (2013) once again draw on their Circuit of Culture; their discussions of three of their moments, representation, production and consumption, offer a number of great examples of why it is important to rid oneself of a mindset which sees things only from one point of view.
Representation has to do with the forms of messages and what is encoded within them. If a public relations practitioner is operating in different countries, he or she must have an understanding not only of the different linguistic connotations of the words used but of their cultural context. One cannot take what is used in one place and assume it may work elsewhere, even with only minor adaptations. This list of international marketing fails, includes one from Coors, who wanted to use its “Turn it loose” campaign in Spain…where the tagline read as “Suffer from diarrhea.” It’s not just language. Another example from the same Business News Daily article explains how Pampers didn’t do well in Japan, because the country had no cultural context for a stork delivering babies, an essential part of Proctor & Gamble’s packaging.
An excerpt from Business News Daily’s Lost in Translation: 10 International Marketing Fails (link to https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/5241-international-marketing-fails.html)
Production, as Curtin and Gaither (2013) point out, has to be tailored to audiences. American companies also have to be very much aware of the globalization-colonialization tug of war. For a country to accept American products and messaging, it has to reshape its own culture. And there is a price to pay. If they package their own culture for others, then they also risk commoditizing it and allowing others to appropriate. For brands to enter smaller markets, they must be cognizant of the cost and the power differential. They must also be aware of how they produce what they produce. The discussions surrounding both being careful not to aim to satisfy internal audiences at the expense of external audiences and of ensuring that those with deep local knowledge are a part of the decision-making process is vital. This kind of production and research is meant to avoid both taking a single US-centric approach and treating vast audiences as one. Asia, Africa, the Middle East, South and Central Asia, Eastern and Western Europe, etc. – each is made up of many countries with many regions with many cultures. Production must take that into consideration.
When Curtin and Gaither (2013) turned to consumption, it became more interesting to me. As they noted, once materials are released to the world, there is no control over how they are interpreted, and this is why substantial pre-launch research needs to be carried out. Their discussion on how the understanding has progressed from a linear understanding of pushing out messages to Bernays’ notion that consumers take what they want and leave what they do not to one of consumption not being the end of a process but the beginning of one – all this nicely coincided with ideas I remember discussing in a Philosophy of Art class I took when I was an undergraduate. When an artist creates a piece of work and then releases it, he or she no longer has any control as to how audiences receive it. Each person who looks at a painting or hears a piece of music or watches a play sees things through individual lenses that, as with public relations, has many factors which shape opinion. Gender, age, language, religion, socio-economic status, upbringing, family life – the list goes on.
The difference though is that artists create in order to express what they want, whereas public relations professionals are looking to penetrate publics with their messaging (usually in order to sell them on a concept or product), and so they have a different level of intent. As with ensuring that messaging does not represent meaning, here too, creating the level of desired consumption demands that research be carried out. Public are not monolithic.
Since Curtin and Gaither’s (2013) book came out, we know that the numbers of people using technology has changed. This does not only speak to the way consumption can be increased, but also to the way research can be carried out. With an estimated world population of 7.8 billion, according to Worldometers, we see that more than half the world population has access online, though almost 60% of the content online is in English, per w3techs.
From https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-population-worldwide/ and https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_language
In addition to training oneself not to think of publics as monolithic entities, a second major point was also made this week. And that is that the only way to dig in deeply and understand the subject matter, publics, context, etc. is to carry out research. Curtin and Gaither (2013) offer the reader what they call a practice matrix for using in international contexts. More checklist than matrix, their tool certainly serves as a strong foundation for conducting research. From there, given the advances in social media since, it may be useful to contemplate how to add to it. As for the four case studies, they offered strong examples of research in action. In each we saw how focus group, surveys, interviews with different target groups were fully employed in order to ensure that the public information campaigns would be successful. But more than that, they served as examples of public relations initiatives by groups that had no connection to the United States (with the exception of the U.S. Government Printing Office being used in the example about the Panama Canal). For this reason, they were especially useful for Americans to see and learn from. Each case study was exemplary.
Curtin, P. A. & Gaither, T. K. (2013). International Public Relations: Negotiating Culture, Identity, and Power. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Len-Rios, M.E. Preparing for Fall Stewardship: A Public Information Campaign for the Panama Canal. Fifteen Case Studies in International Public Relations, VanSlyke Turk, Judy and Scanlan, Linda H., eds. 1999. University of Florida. pp. 42-51
Navarro, M. Biotechnology in a Third World Context: Mobilizing Public Awareness, Understanding and Appreciation. Fifteen Case Studies in International Public Relations, VanSlyke Turk, Judy and Scanlan, Linda H., eds. 1999. pp. 18-26. University of Florida
Rossbach, A., Newsom, D. & Carrell, B. The European Community’s “PHARE Program” for 13 Eastern and Central European Countries. Fifteen Case Studies in International Public Relations, VanSlyke Turk, Judy and Scanlan, Linda H., eds. 1999. pp. 27-41. University of Florida
Vercic, D. Public Communications Campaign for the World Bank Air Pollution Abatement Program in Slovenia. Fifteen Case Studies in International Public Relations, VanSlyke Turk, Judy and Scanlan, Linda H., eds. 1999. pp 8-17. University of Florida.