Nothing sucks....

Cultural differences in marketing can surprise you when you take a Danish message to another country. In this 2011 video, I talk about reactions we experienced from American customers at SPAMfighter.

Cultural differences in marketing: A Christmas greeting

We sent an email saying Merry Christmas. To us, it was about Santa, presents and Christmas spirit. But some customers read it as a religious message and wrote angry replies.

I thought the reactions were extreme, and you can hear that in my tone in the video. But it didn’t change the fact that customers understood our greeting differently from how we’d intended it.

We also experienced criticism of the words blacklist and whitelist in the product. To us, those were terms for email addresses you wanted to block or allow. Others gave the words a different meaning.

What you mean isn’t always what the customer hears

I also mention the English vacuum cleaner slogan Nothing sucks like Electrolux as an example of a word being read in more than one way. In the video, I use it to discuss language and misunderstandings.

My point isn’t that everyone in a country reacts the same way. It’s that our Danish expectations aren’t necessarily a good measure of how a message will be received abroad.

Get a local to read it

Before sending a newsletter in another language, get someone with local knowledge to look at it. Not just the spelling, but the tone and what the words might signal too. Also read E-pusher about my experiences of online marketing.

We hired an American, and I felt it helped. Religion and politics were areas I’d learned to pay extra attention to in our communication. That was my experience from the USA back then.

A dispute between synagogues on the TV news

I’d watched the American news the night before and nearly fell over laughing. As I understood the story, a rabbi had broken with a synagogue and started his own. Now there was a dispute about competition, prices and a non-compete clause.

I recounted it as a story about the new synagogue making attendance cheaper and the original one therefore suing. That’s how I remembered the TV item, not a case I’d investigated myself.

I wasn’t religious and didn’t even have all the terminology straight. You could clearly hear that. I didn’t care what people believed, but I found the contrast comical: I’d imagined it was about getting as many people as possible to believe and be devout. Instead, I saw people getting angry about competition and money.

I sharpened it with a remark about money for a jacuzzi and a Rolls-Royce. That was my sarcastic comment on what I saw, not evidence of what those involved spent their money on.

Our Danish Christmas greeting was read differently

The TV story made me think about how different countries could be. There were many things in the USA I found completely different from Denmark. So you needed to be careful when trading across borders.

At SPAMfighter, we’d once sent American customers an email saying Merry Christmas. Afterwards, in my experience, lots of angry replies came from Jewish and Muslim customers, among others. They saw the greeting as a Christian symbol.

We’d been thinking of Santa, presents and Danish Christmas pastries. We hadn’t been sitting there thinking about customers’ religion. My immediate reaction was that people should relax, and I put it rather crudely in the video.

But as a business, we wanted their money and to keep them as customers. So whatever I personally thought about the reactions, we had to learn to think carefully about our communication.

Blacklist and whitelist caused trouble too

Another experience involved the words blacklist and whitelist in the product. Blacklist meant email addresses you didn’t want mail from, while whitelist meant those you always wanted to receive from.

I said we’d received criticism from black civil rights groups who saw the terms as racist. That wasn’t the meaning we’d given them, but it was another example of a reaction we hadn’t anticipated.

A vacuum cleaner slogan I’d heard again and again

I also brought up the familiar story about the slogan Nothing sucks like Electrolux. I used it as an example of an English word taking on a different meaning from what the sender intended.

In my loose retelling, I described it as a major advertising blunder and imagined the person who’d come up with that brilliant vacuum cleaner slogan. I hadn’t investigated the campaign’s origins or sales figures. I also wondered whether, after so many years of discussion, the story might have ended up working for the brand anyway.

The point was to check at least the basics of the local culture, whether you wanted to run an e-commerce business, give talks abroad or do something else entirely.

Religion and politics could matter more than I was used to

Religion and politics were two subjects I thought you should avoid debating in other countries when you didn’t know the circumstances. Here in Denmark, I could chuckle about religion and perhaps lose a listener or ten. I found it could have very different consequences in the USA.

I put it very bluntly with a remark that you could almost not become a school caretaker without professing faith in God. That was my characterisation of the climate I experienced at the time, not a description of a legal job requirement.

I also referred to a study I thought I’d seen, recounting it as Americans trusting a Satanist more than an atheist. I had no source in the video. It was my impression of the coverage that made me say people apparently related better to someone who believed in something than someone who didn’t believe at all.

An American helped us avoid the next misunderstanding

My closing encouragement was simple: Think before you send your next newsletter in another language. Get a local to look it over and stop you before you offend a large proportion of your customers.

Our experiences at SPAMfighter led us to hire an American. I thought things had gone quite well since then. That was the practical experience I wanted to pass on.

De bedste hilsner

Martin