What Ethnic Diversity Means For America

In cultural terms, the American culture is unique. Given the time in history when the first European settlers came to the new world, the Americas – and the United States in particular – have developed multi-ethnic cultures that are highly adaptive, very creative and, without question, confusing.

Although what I write here is derived primarily from my own observations of life and culture here in the USA, I imagine that to one extent or another, these observations also hold true in much of the Americas. You see, with very few exceptions, almost everyone who lives in the Americas is related to someone who came from somewhere else (i.e. another country outside of the Americas).

And confronted with a harsh, if not downright hostile, natural environment and limited consumable resources, our ancestors had to learn to rely on one another to maintain their existence. Later generations of immigrants to the Americas faced similar challenges – although the times and problems were different.

As generations passed and cultures layered themselves one atop the other, a synthesis occurred (and is still happening). This multi-cultural synthesis is rich in its diversity and sometimes painful in its own, inner conflict. But it’s part of what makes this place so unique and so creative. Without the layering of cultures, the world would not have jazz, the tradition of a free press, publicly funded school systems or the Internet.

Creativity is not always a quiet, little process that results in a beautiful painting or ingenious new idea. In fact, creativity is often violent and conflicted. Nowhere else but in the culture of America is that better demonstrated.

While cultural conflicts aren’t necessarily a pretty thing – many times the resolution to that conflict is.

America’s diversity as a nation has contributed and will continue to drive its spirit of creativity and innovation. Conflicts, or at least the threat of conflict, will force people to see things they may not normally want to see – and, most importantly, the threat of conflict will inspire a select few to find a resolution.

Cultures adapt over time. America’s blend of cultures means we’re often adapting in fits and starts. Sometimes ahead. Sometimes behind. It’s a beat that sounds like a different drummer to those who are not familiar with our country or how we cope with change. But it is our drummer.

To each, a beat of his own.

Technorati Tags: Marketing, Advertising, B2B Marketing, Ethnic Advertising, Minority Marketing, Client Management, Leadership, Creative Thinking, Culture, Cultural Diversity

(c) 2006 - Brand Central Station, all rights reserved. For more information on Brand Central Station, please visit our website.

America’s History Of Innovation

America values creativity – it’s both a necessity and a challenge to conformity with the rest of the world. As a strength, America’s love of things creative bolsters the general optimism that we have. As a weakness, our creativity sometimes generates so many options that we’re slow and inefficient when trying to assess everything.

It can’t come as much of a surprise that creativity and innovation are native to the American culture. After all, when our forefathers landed in this country, they had very little in the way of assets with them and all the resource of North America with which to work. Since then, the application of wit and creativity to resources has paid off handsomely.

Creativity was a contributing factor to the survival of the early settlers in the American continent, too. With large, natural barriers like the Mississippi River, Great Plains and Rocky Mountains before them, pioneers had to create their own methods to overcome these natural features. To fail meant certain death or starvation.

And so it goes that in a land where you had to create and make what you needed to survive, a culture that embraced creativity and innovation was born. A history of innovation in America can be found here.

Today we find communities investing in venture capital centers (like this one in my home town). Community leaders have decided that it’s actually in the public’s interest to continue fostering innovation, with the hope that one of these start-up ventures will become the next Microsoft.

Technorati Tags: Marketing, Advertising, Branding, Brand, Leadership, Client Management, Innovation, Creative Thinking

(c) 2006 - Brand Central Station, all rights reserved. For more information on Brand Central Station, please visit our website.

America’s Fascination With Market Research

Americans are among the most measured and monitored people on the planet – and for a society built on civil and social liberties, that serves as a confusing paradox for many foreigners.

During the first half of the twentieth century, there weren’t always enough consumer goods for everyone who wanted them. Manufacturers didn’t have a difficult time selling their products and so they didn’t have to worry much about what their customers really wanted. As Henry Ford was famous for saying: ‘Americans can have any color car they wanted, as long as it was black.’

That manufacturer to consumer dynamic changed after the end of World War II, however. From that point on, consumers had more and better choices and companies quickly learned they needed to make products customers really wanted. With that realization, the consumer market research industry was born.

Worldwide, there are literally billions of consumers out there who have varying preferences, making market research vitally important. In the USA, consumers are measured in a variety of ways: by neighborhood, by political affiliation, by income, by entertainment preference, by lifestyle, by age. We are among the most “measured” people on the planet.

But the American view of market research is decidedly less sinister than the way the discipline is viewed in other countries. There are two primary reasons for this: 1) the cultural view (and assumptions made of the intentions) of big businesses and private enterprise and 2) the cultural view (and assumptions made of the intentions) of government.

As can be seen in the violent (and non-violent) demonstrations against globalization and big business, much of the rest of the world keeps a very jaded view of the intentions of entrepreneurs and industrialists. I recently ran into this at an international meeting of several of my PR colleagues. We were discussing the positive values of our organization and I suggested “Entrepreneurial” as a positive value. The rest of the group disagreed, however, citing negative qualities associated with the word (self-interest, greed, etc.).

This general distrust of business and industry has lead to a very slow adoption of many of the market research standards that we’ve had in the US for some time. Of course, evolution of methodology and cultural acceptance of market research concepts are different on a country-by-country basis – but a clear example of this can be seen in a recent direct marketing effort my colleagues in Europe launched earlier last year.

Direct mail pieces were printed by my English and German colleagues who intended to use them in a way very similar to the way we would implement a direct marketing campaign in the US. Other partners (from other countries in Europe) ordered additional direct mail pieces to supplement their programs. In the re-cap, however, I was intrigued to learn that nearly half of the companies did not send out the direct mail pieces until after they had made an introductory call to the prospect first – almost the direct opposite of how we would manage the program in the US.

I was further surprised to learn that two of the agencies had the cards printed and kept them on hand to use as a response piece when they were contacted by a new business prospect. They said it was “bad form” to cold call and even worse to send unsolicited direct mail.

Conversely, when looking at the collection and use of data by government, many people outside the USA feel more comfortable with their government collecting financial and demographic information than they do with private companies collecting the same. Why is this?

A case can be made, I think, that the more a native state emphasizes its “social” role (e.g. many European countries have a more “socialistic” approach to government than we do in the US), the more the people of that country expect the government to have pertinent, personal information. While consumer data held by the government might be considered an abrogation of our civil rights here in the USA, that kind of consumer knowledge is acceptable in other countries.

Globally, market research is reaching a common standard – and it’s likely to have an even bigger impact as we move more and more transactions and interactions online.

Technorati Tags: Marketing, Branding, Market Research, Customer Relationships, Vendor Relationships, Employee Training, Sales Training, Informed Decision Making

(c) 2006 - Brand Central Station, all rights reserved. For more information on Brand Central Station, please visit our website.

Why Americans Aren't Very Good At Collaborating

Culturally, Americans have a handicap when it comes to collaborating (online or in person). And unless we do something to identify and address this problem, we’ll come in to every international opportunity at a severe disadvantage.

Blame it on our forefathers – the original settlers to the New World were, in many ways, a bunch of malcontents who didn’t fit in and couldn’t get along with those they left behind. In later years, immigrants to America came with their own dreams of glory, riches, freedom, etc. But rarely was it a dream to “work with other people.”

No, collaboration – as a value – is not necessarily inherent in the American DNA. Just look at several of the icons that symbolize America and American values: the stoic outsider, the religious Puritan, the lone cowboy, the rugged farmer, the resourceful entrepreneur. Each of these images celebrate the individual as much as his or her accomplishments.

The values represented by these symbols aren’t bad. In fact, the American historical experience that has made ideals like creativity, honesty and hard work valuable tends to reward the output of collaboration particularly well – innovation. Look at all the firsts coming from this culture over the past 250+ years and you see a steady stream of innovations that were an interesting blend of one person’s idea mixed with the resourcefulness and passion of others.

You see, when we put our mind to it, Americans can be very good at collaborating. My point is that it has to be an intentional thing. Collaboration is not second nature to us. Not yet, anyway.

Keeping that in mind, it’s easy to see why our political leadership can get cross-wise with peers from other parts of the world. Claims of American hegemony are painful but understandable (whether they’re true or not is, and always will be, a subject of debate) and are a direct result from our initial desires to “do our own thing” rather than to collaborate with other partners.

There are two other aspects of American social culture that play into this discussion. The first is our tendency towards self-segregation and, on a much larger scale, isolation. The historical roots behind this run deep. Physical barriers separated the first colonists of our continent and, as a result, it was commonly accepted practice to favor those with whom you were raised. Cultural biases from the old world were carried across the Atlantic, as well. Just because everyone was in the Americas did not mean their dislike for one another had been left in Europe.

Segregation was never directly addressed until the 1950’s – and even then, the causes of civil liberties and civil rights have had a rocky history. A good bit of this arises from the tendencies of those in power to want to retain that power – both political and economic. Add to that a myriad of opinions and accusations all made under the protection of the 1st Amendment to the Constitution and you have a dynamic situation that is still generations away from being solved. (More on that another time.)

The second aspect of American culture that works against the need to collaborate is our physical size and location in the world. For hundreds of years, it was hard to get here. America operated alone and in isolation. This country wasn’t even considered to be a world power until the Imperial Era of the late 19th Century – and even then, our approach tended to be more laissez-faire than England, France, Spain and the other Western European powers that be.

Our tendency towards isolation was probably most notable in the run-up to World War II. But there are still shards of this attitude left today. Our country’s reaction to 9/11 is a direct result of this underlying tendency towards isolationism.

So successful collaboration between Americans and others in the world is possible, just not automatic. It takes work – possibly even more work from the American in the group or committee – to be successful. But given our history of creativity, our passion to succeed and an honest, American curiosity to see how good things can be, collaboration can be a winning strategy.

Technorati Tags: Marketing, Branding, Collaboration, Partnership, Hawthorne Effect, Customer Relationships, Vendor Relations, Leadership, Culture

(c) 2006 - Brand Central Station, all rights reserved. For more information on Brand Central Station, please visit our website.

Oh Say Can You See?

We’ve been spending time on the BCS blogs this week, talking about the importance of “vision” as a guiding element behind the creation of brand value. I maintain that this is especially true in the United States and that the idea of using a stated “vision” as a management tool is due, in large part, to the culture of America.

The concept of “vision” to describe an idea or, more specifically, an ideal state, is not unusual. Humans have always tied something of the divine to the sense of sight – arguably the most important sense we have. The ability to see is directly dependent upon our optic nerves which are just extensions of our brain. Humans take in a majority of their information through site. In short, we’ve evolved to the point where seeing and vision is very critical to our species’ survival.

Ancient people recognized this to one extent or another. Mystics who were thought to be able to converse with the gods were called “seers”. Visions were considered to be shared among those who were blessed. Back in the days of ancient man, if you had a vision you were destined to become a priest of some kind – a pretty good job if you could swing it a few millennia ago.

Then the politicians had to move in and spoil everything. Military men and ancient rulers would claim some vision from one god or another and then march off to war against their enemy. Apparently, either the gods who sent the visions didn’t know how to communicate very well or the visions themselves were too convoluted to be of much good, because many of these campaigns ended in disaster. Visions were, it seemed, not particularly well-suited for war unless they were supplemented with a heavy dose of strategy.

One military man who seemed to do okay with his visions, though, was the Roman Emperor, Constantine. The night before the battle of Milvian Bridge, Constantine had a vision in which he was instructed to place the sign of Christ on the shields of his soldiers. Fortunately for Constantine, he won the battle of Milvian Bridge and eventually co-opted his relationship with the Christian church, turning it into an instrument of imperial policy.

But the die was cast. A “vision” was given special standing in the eyes of mere men – and it would remain that way for generations to come.

The difference between this imperial/holy vision and what we’ve come to know and understand as a vision in America can trace its roots back to the Declaration of Independence. This was the work of men, working together to make a stand against imperial power – a power claiming authority from a higher power. But the work of Jefferson, Franklin and the others on the committee drafting the document did not rely on visions delivered in dreams but rather the combined works and philosophies of men seeking a more “natural” explanation of rights and the place of man in the world.

During this period, known as the Age of Enlightenment, man started claiming visions for himself – inspired by God, nature, beauty, whatever. The word “vision” started to take on a new meaning that didn’t mean a literal sighting of an event or person but rather an idea.

Over the growth and development of the American experience, the vision identified by the Founding Fathers of our country has had to grow and change to meet the changing social landscape in which we live. Keeping the vision “fresh” seems to be an important part of the process. The vision of America (often referred to as the “American Dream”) has changed in the last two hundred years to embrace the rights of women and minorities as equals to property-owning white men (as represented by the original founders).

And technology has played its part, too.

Originally, a “vision” had to be expressed solely in words and actions. But now, thanks to an ubiquitous media, Americans (and people around the world) try to understand by looking at something rather than really understanding it. This may be placing too much literal value on “vision” as opposed to its conceptual worth.

There’s debate even today that some of our great speech writing presidents (e.g. Lincoln) and leaders (e.g. Washington) never would have passed muster in today’s political climate because we’ve discounted the value of the words and thoughts and put more emphasis on style and eye appeal.

The danger we face here is that we often accept a visual representation as a “vision” without really listening to the words or “substance” that goes along with it. It’s easier. It’s faster. But it’s often wrong. Unless everyone in the audience shares the values, concepts and lexicon of the speaker, misunderstanding is bound to occur.

Then there’s the “follow-up” problem. You see, as the American experience shows us time and again, a vision won’t work unless it’s constantly communicated and re-defined to reflect the changes in the environment. That’s why successful leaders must always reassess and reassure people on the accuracy of their understanding and the value of the plans the build on that understanding.

For the past 231 years, we have shared in a common vision for a place where people can pursue life, liberty and happiness. It’s meant different things at different times – but that’s okay. Keeping a vision alive isn’t supposed to be easy.

(c) 2006 - Brand Central Station, all rights reserved. For more information on Brand Central Station, please visit our website.