How to Make Your Business Relatable to a Global Audience

Here in the 21st century, with the advent of worldwide communication via TV stations as well as the all-pervasive Internet, many companies are looking into how they can more effectively do business internationally. The founders of start-ups and the senior sales and marketing executives of larger firms are going to want to know how their products and services stand up in ranking intercontinentally.

International Business Mindset

Let us pause for a moment and consider the term “international business.” On the surface, it may seem pretty straightforward. If a product or service has a place for application and usability in different countries, at most one might need to consider monetary exchange rates and translating some of the company’s information into another language. Not so fast. A number of Fortune 500 companies have been doing business globally as “multinational” companies for years, long before the advent of worldwide cable TV and the Internet. One thing that became apparent is that managing things such as new product launches and enhancements to business efforts in various countries was more complex than converting U.S. dollars to Japanese Yen, or English to German. To encapsulate the proper international thinking, we could say a company must, early on, think of a multilingual and multicultural approach to doing business in different countries.

Limits of a Narrow Mindset

Whereas there are many similarities in the ways different people use particular products and services in different countries, there are myriad differences in the deeper perceptions and opinions of these people based on long-standing cultural and national traits and norms. Unfortunately, in the past, governments and the leaders of large multinational corporations had the mindset that ‘foreigners’ should adapt to their belief system and way of behaving. This has never turned out to be viable, long term. It has been the cause of intergovernmental conflict in the political world and business faux pas and disasters in the business world.

Mindset for Global Business in the 21st Century

This mindset is simply a non-starter for any business, large or small, attempting to do business on the international stage today. Rather, one might begin with this thought from renowned American anthropologist Clyde Kluckhon: “Every human is like all other humans, some other humans, and no other human.”