🙌 How cultures impact behaviours

We’re always picking the brains of interesting new people as part of the Open Your Mind event series, and this September was no exception. For our latest session we spoke to Mélanie Chevalier, founder of Creative Culture to understand a bit more about cultural intelligence  🧠 and why it’s useful for strategists.

Why cultural blunders happen

There are many ways to make a mis-step ⛔ when making advertising that is culturally relevant  to a range of different countries and communities - from not paying attention to religious differences in a region, to celebrating social events that exist in your key market but not in other countries and much more. Slip-ups like this tend to happen when there are no experts on the ground in all target countries that can adjust a multinational campaign for cultural relevance. Cue social media backlashes, reputation damage and more 😡

So here are the top five take-aways for developing culturally relevant campaigns

1. Culture eats data for lunch -  demographic info 📊 on its own isn’t enough. Find out which cultures people belong to. Hunt down the ‘culture mavens’ in your company- people that are well placed to ‘take the social temperature’ in a region, or online community.

2. Think differently -  it’s easy to fall into traps when it comes to cultural research. Relying on outdated research for instance, or worse still, assumptions and stereotypes 😲! Watch out for any lazy assumptions as they crop up and root them out!

3. Get local markets involved -  the earlier this happens the better. They can be the important first step in flagging potential issues, based on what’s happening on the ground socially and politically. 

4. Diversity matters -   as well as hiring people that think, look and act differently from each other, and give them room to discuss, debate and disagree. Difference is not a threat, used well it can result in the kind of original, well - tested thinking that you need for jaw-dropping campaigns

5. Think long term -  it may be a bit resource hungry at the start, but don’t let that put you off. Getting culturally relevant campaigns right will serve you well 🙏 not only in protecting you from social media backlashes, but also in terms of connecting with a broader range of people and even, finding lovely new customers 😊