Interbrand’s Chairman Rita Clifton believes that good branding is the only way of generating sustainable value.

I heard Clifton speak at my livery last night about the winners and losers of the international brand world. 

US brands account for 51 of the world’s leading top 100 brands, Germany for 11, France for eight and the UK for only four.

The most dramatic entry into this league has been Google. Clifton attributes its success to the consistency between external messages and internal culture. “It’s no longer possible to look nice on the outside and have an axe-murdering culture on the inside.”

Apple is another winner. Its design has brought humanity to technology. “You just want to lick their products!”
If you are a brand owner, you have to remember three key points: clarity (as to what you stand for), consistency and leadership (to rally people around brand values).

Yang-May and I believe that the interactive web has made it possible for the man/woman in the street to promote their personal brand online the same way celebrities and products do. Web 2.0 has levelled the playing ground. This is one of the main points we will be making this evening as part of our guest lecture at London Metropolitan University.

If you work in cross-cultural communications, what you want to avoid at all cost is the cookie cutter. 

Koushik Chatterjee, CFO of Tata Steel, gave a great definition of it in a recent interview with McKinsey: “We do these five things, and therefore these five things must be done by everyone.”

His approach to international M&A is different: “we quite genuinely tend to look at an acquisition as a partnership rather than an acquisition”.

“We don’t send planeloads of people into a new company. Instead, we only send a few integrators. That’s been the key interface.”

I particularly like his way of engaging employees from the acquired company, a process he calls “shared change”: “we share and adopt good practices across the organisation through performance-improvement teams…This gives employees in the acquired organisation a sense of confidence that they too have good things that the parent company is absorbing”.

Chatterjee admits that “it takes time to positively influence a large organisation”. But the secret is to build “trust in the sincerity of the shared vision”.

Trust might take longer to establish but once you are there, “things move faster; you don’t have to go around reassuring people”.

Is it for real or not?

Every time I discuss the interactive web with fellow communicators, one of the first questions on people’s mind is “how are we going to convince senior management of the importance of introducing social media”.

I had a great time last week talking to IABC Belgium about International Communications Strategy and the different case studies contained in the book.

My advice to Cheryl who asked me the famous question is to use the information and data available to make the business case for Web 2.0.

While in the West we are still desperately trying to measure the ROI of social media, China has been able to figure out a way to track online conversations and link them to purchase decisions.

According to CiC, the Chinese internet community supports the “most expansive and developed participation architecture in the world”.

The influence of user-generated content (blogs, discussions on bulletin boards, etc.) on the decisions of Chinese consumers has been estimated at 58% while it is less than 20% in the US. 

There are lessons to be learned for communicators.

For example, the same method could be used in internal communications to track employees’ interactions on online forums and assess their attitude towards different corporate initiatives.

I was watching the comedian Lee Evans over the weekend (I am a great fan and … we were born on the same day!).

He was saying how he always prepares tons of notes for his shows only to realise later that they don’t make sense.

I know how he feels…

No matter how often I give a presentation… the Germanic part of my upbringing  always forces me to spend hours at my desk rehearsing again and again…  

When I’ve had enough, I switch off and start thinking of my audience. I once heard that the secret of presenting is loving your audience.

I know it sounds corny…. But it works!

It’s not difficult to look forward to my audience this week.

On Thursday, I will be giving a presentation about International Communications Strategy for the Belgian chapter of IABC.

It was in Brussels that I joined IABC 12 years ago. I served on the local board for a long time. So I am really looking forward to seeing my former fellow board members Lyndon, Sam, Ilze and all the others.

I have started to discuss ICS’s main points on IABC Belgium’s Ning.

As usual, I was asked about the development of internet marketing in Asia. Part of my talk will be about the interactive web in China and how its communities are changing the relationship between people and brands.

You can read more about what Yang-May and I think of internet marketing at DMI online.

Deracinées. That’s what my co-author Yang-May and I were called in a recent review of our book.

The word has always intrigued me. But it was only recently, during a vacation in the mountains, that I was able to understand where my true roots lie.

It’s people that define them not geography.

On a gorgeous Saturday morning in August, I took a chairlift up the Dolomites to accompany my old friend Thomas and his friend Norbert on a mountain walk with a purpose.

For the past 20 years, Thomas and Norbert have been fighting greedy developers for the preservation of this unique section of the Alps. Recently, they used the internet to collect signatures from all over the world to prevent the construction of a sky resort in a particularly vulnerable part of these mountains.

Thomas and Norbert looked happy that morning. The Dolomites were about to be declared a United Nations World Heritage Site by UNESCO. The ceremony would take place in the Italian region of Friuli a week later.

While hiking up, I couldn’t stop observing Norbert. I remembered him vaguely from my days at Innsbruck University where the three of us studied. And I must admit, my recollection was more than vague due to what he calls “excessive partying”.

Norbert is a force of nature. His way of fighting for the environment feels strangely familiar. It is too similar to the nagging feeling I have had for years that if you believe in something, you have to stand up for it.

I guess this is the story of how I discovered one of my roots in someone I barely know and had not seen for years.

In case you were wondering…. Cross-cultural communication is to me what the Dolomites are to Norbert.

I will be thinking of him on Wednesday when Yang-May and I will present  International Communications Strategy in London.

Diversity is no longer a pet project on the sidelines of corporate life.

A number of trends indicate that companies with a diverse workforce are likely to perform better in the years to come.

According to official data, the amount of mutual fund assets under management (AuM) is shifting from the Global North to emerging markets. AuM decreased by 10% in Europe in the past three years, while it increased by 37.6% in Brazil and Chile and by 19.2% in Asia including China, India  and Korea.

Multinationals from emerging economies are engaging more and more with businesses in Europe and the US. Companies with a diverse staff will find it easier to understand these new business partners. A diverse  workforce brings a mixture of experiences and resources that employers will be able to turn into a powerful competitive advantage when dealing with other parts of the world.

And let’s not forget that Generation Y is coming into the workforce and is looking for jobs that resonate with their values. Inclusion ranks high among them. Gen Y is used to being in contact with people from other cultures. Social networking and online games have turned their world into a digital orange.

Annette Verschuren, President and CEO of The Home Depot for Canada and Asia, believes that the business secret of the future will be about including and inspiring people who in the past we thought did not belong.

Bieneosa Ebite and I will be talking about Cross Cultural PR and Diversity at the CIPR in October. Bienosa is the managing director of Bright Star Public Relations and a founding member of the UK Black and Asian PR Networking Group, which aims to encourage diversity in the PR industry.

Click here to join us on 12 October.

How do you structure silence…?

I came across a quote by Daniel Barenboim, the renowned pianist: “…it is so disruptive when an enthusiastic audience applauds before the final sound has died away, because there is one last moment of expressivity, which is precisely the relationship between the end of the sound and the beginning of the silence that follows. In this respect music is a mirror of life, because both start and end in nothing”.

As a communicator, you feel under constant pressure to fill silence with words and messages.

Silence often terrifies us….We dread silence during presentations because we think it can only mean two things: either we have forgotten what to say or that the audience is not interested and is therefore not asking questions.

We all live under the tyranny of words until something happens…

It was my coaching  training that made me realise the power of silence.

Silence is an essential component of any successful coaching session… Only by building in silence can issues be explored in depth…. Real break-throughs only happen after powerful moments of silence…

So how do we apply this to communications?

The answer might be that we just need to be brave and resist the urge to structure every minute of our presentations, sessions, pitches, etc.

Another quote by Barenboim got me thinking: “I will … attempt the impossible and try to draw some connections between the inexpressible content of music and the inexpressible content of life”.

Communicators do the same. We are brokers of passions. We help people express ideas and we get audiences excited about them.

Is silence the secret ingredient we need to use to turn ideas into reality?

I used to find index charts soothing.  

You might think I’m strange. But when I worked as a financial journalist, they would stimulate my thinking….

Like a mandala, I would look at them and they would give me a sense of clarity…. After a while, sentences would start flowing in my mind.

I haven’t found financial charts soothing lately.

But yesterday, I was glad to hear at a seminar that markets are showing signs of normalisation. Which doesn’t mean that the recession is over. But markets have at least stopped to be out of control and are experiencing some sort of stabilisation.

 However, analysts believe that the UK and Europe will not be able to attract significant investment for a while.  

The spotlight has moved to the East.

Most Asian countries already had their financial crisis in 1998.  It enabled them to clean house and left their banks with strong balance sheets. On top of this, they were able to create high levels of self-generating demand.

China and India are continuing to grow, and most importantly, their middle-classes are growing. International capital is being lured by the prospect of huge sales volumes.

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Communications  and marketing are right at the core of this trend.

With little growth to be expected in the West, many of the companies we are working for are increasingly looking at China and India.

One of the first tasks they will have to master is reaching out to audiences and engaging with consumers in these markets.

My co-author Yang-May and I talked to podcasting guru Neville Hobson on Friday about the story behind our book.

I was asked how I came up with the original idea behind International Communications Strategy. To answer that, I had to dig quite deep into my memory.

It all happened when I was living in Prague 20 years ago. What they used to call the Golden City was such a great cultural centre before WWII thanks of the different ethnic groups represented there. The war and the madness that followed did away with all that.

I could never understand this terrible loss. When I left Prague in the mid 1990s, I embarked on a quest. I wanted to find a way that would help people from different cultural backgrounds to communicate and bond.

After that came my passion for understanding emerging economies and their communication models.

If you’d like to find out more about how Yang-May and I got to writ
e the book, you can listen to the podcast .

Thanks, Neville. And we hope we’ll get to meet your cat some day…

The ability to write is such a mixed blessing.

It is an integral part of who you are and you can’t do without it. A friend of mine who edits a magazine in the US told me once that only when she writes she feels that she is doing real work.

I have this nagging feeling sometimes when I am in meetings that I should not be there… I should be at my computer instead….writing. As if I had to report everything I experience… every day… ever minute.

To complicate the matter, the business communication profession is often misunderstood. Why do companies need professional writers and story tellers, given that everybody can more or less knock a couple of sentences together?

Next time you are asked this question, you can quote Colonel David Scott.

Scott was the commander of the Apollo 15 mission to the moon. Ever since his lunar landing in 1971, Scott  spent much of his time talking to people who wanted to know how it was like to walk on the moon. He slipped into an unexpected role and became the mission’s story teller.

Scott realised that flying to the moon had been such a pivotal experience in the history of humanity that it wasn’t enough for people to see a couple of minutes of filming on TV. They needed to hear the story from somebody who was there. They needed another human being to tell them how it felt. It was important for them in order to be able to integrate this event into their consciousness.

This is why Scott is calling for the crew of future missions to the moon or Mars to include non-scientists, people able to describe the splendour of the cosmos. “It could be an artist or a poet or a writer - or even a songwriter”.

What a great endorsement for our profession!!!