First of all, know yourself and your own culture, secondly know the other person, his/her culture, then you’ll “know how to react, relate, and work with others.”

by Shawn Parker

Knowing yourself and your culture means you become an objective, almost external observer of your culture: you don’t just live it, you are aware, you take a distance and observe it with the same anthropologist’s neutrality as you might observe a foreign culture. Can you critically re-examine everything you have until now always taken for granted or considered as obvious, self-evident…?

Knowing the other person means recognizing both idiosyncratic (deeply personal) and cultural differences, then realizing that “deep inside we are all the same” as the saying goes. Have you ever thought or said that “deep inside we are all the same“?

As regards cultural differences, let’s note that a foreign culture is neither a wall to be crashed into, nor an obstacle to be knocked down, but rather, more simply and more conveniently, it is a door to be unlocked. We give you the key to that door. Learn about the foreign country, its history, geography, literature, its culture in all its “fundamental aspects, such as language, religion, social norms and values, education, and the living style.” (See Robert Guang Tian, Ph. D. “Marketing in the 21st Century – Cross-cultural Issues”).

Knowing the culture is not enough, however essential it may be, because it is no more than a social construct. But you must first accept the culture if you want to be accepted. Now, what do you see after you open that door? You stand face-to-face with an individual, a human being, just like you and me.

We are all people. Your foreign counterparts are people, just like you and me. They have a father, a mother, grandparents, maybe a wife or a husband and kids, they have feelings, they have a social life, possibly play a sport, they like music – but most of all, they are individual human beings. Learn as much as you can about the individual’s personal life, history, emotions… Uncover the individual human being hiding behind, or deep inside, underneath the culture, when you move towards the core, our common humanity, towards emotions and feelings, which run deeper than all parochial cultural constructs.

How do we reconcile our commonalities with our uniqueness and our idiosyncrasies? All we have to do is realize that “We connect with each other based on our commonalities and we enrich each other based on our differences”

Now you can talk, you can communicate in the true sense of the word!

As a marketer, note in passing, that cross-cultural awareness means being aware of both the similarities and the differences between your culture and your (potential) customer’s culture

But most of all, remember this: instead of hundreds of countries and thousands of “cultures”, the world is populated by about 7 billion individuals, all of them at once similar and unique. You don’t talk to a “culture”, you talk to a person, an individual, and you discover it’s always possible for two human beings to find a common language

Click on the “Comment” link below and tell us what you think of cultural competency, your experience, how culturally competent you are…