Right communication, wrong culture

If you follow along here, I'm pretty sure we agree that the same message can mean different things to different people. And that this isn't necessarily due to poor communication, but rather that the communication exists in the wrong context.

Right communication, wrong culture.

Midsummer evening in my favourite nature reserve, Glaskogen.

Coming from Sweden, where most of the strong brands create meaning through low context communication, letting space and silence represent trust, confidence and expertise, I sometimes feel the need to downscale the communication and marketing efforts I meet in my professional roles in international settings.

The interpretation of communication efforts will vary depending on what lens you're operating through. If you consume low context communication with a high context cultural lens that might come across as lazy, uneducated or unengaged. While if you communicate in a high context way to someone that is used to a low context environment, that will feel overwhelming and messy.

I've spent the last few years working for two brands that illustrate this tension pretty clearly.

With this framework, POC would be described as a low context brand, deeply rooted in Scandinavian minimalism both aesthetically and in their way of communicating. The Scandinavian style currently has cultural capital, which means POCs minimalistic, technical, precise tone of voice works pretty well globally, without a lot of adaptation needed.

My most recent employer, Burton, would then instead lean more towards being a high context brand, rooted in the American culture and the artsy world of street sports, with a heavy emphasis on personal expression. The American tone and visual language of course works great in the States, but didn't always translate as intended in the European market, where the audience reads more in between the lines, and tends to shy away from too much noise.

This is not at all about what style, culture or way is the best. This is about cultural translation.

The ambition to grow a brand internationally often makes marketing teams focus on keeping communication tight and aligned across channels. Which makes sense. But it can also make us forget that it's the interpretation of the communication that matters, not the communication itself.

If the goal is to create meaning with a new audience, we might get further by going back to the brand values and asking how they need to be expressed differently in a new cultural context. Not what we want to say, but how it needs to land.

Because if we speak in a high context way to a low context consumer, we risk not being listened to at all. Our brand values get lost or ignored, not because the values are wrong, but because the way we're expressing them doesn't mean the same thing to them as it does to us. If we allow ourselves to adjust how we show up, we can still be understood in the same way, just through different means.

What most brands do when they cross borders is trying to export the expression rather than the value. The result can be a brand that feels authentic at home and somehow generic everywhere else.

Core values should exist everywhere across brand and communication efforts. But they shouldn't always have to look the same.