Tag Archives: YouTube

Best Wishes for 2014

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Happy-New-Year-2014-1-1Happy New Year! May 2014 bring you health, joy, love, and much success in your endeavors to build respect, understanding, and collaboration across cultures! We so appreciate you being part of the Cultural Detective community!

As we enter into the third year of this blog, I am quite proud of the quality—and the quantity—of what we have been able to provide. Are you curious about which posts were the most viewed in 2013?

  1. Our top post of 2013 was Research Findings: The Value of Intercultural Skills in the Workplace. A very powerful study of 367 employers in nine countries, commissioned by The British Council and conducted by Booz Allen Hamilton and IPSOS Public Affairs, found that employers want to hire people with intercultural skills. The most frequently cited intercultural skills these employers desired were the ability to demonstrate respect for others, the ability to build trust across cultures, and the ability to work effectively in diverse teams. This was my first time creating an animated-drawing video, and I am pleased that it was republished widely. The British Council put narration to it and published it on their YouTube channel to help promote the original study, and we published a Spanish language version of the video as well. If you didn’t get a chance to read this important study or view the video summary, don’t miss it.
  2. Many of you work in virtual teams and across distances, so not surprisingly, our second most popular post of 2013 was 5 Top (Free & Easy) Virtual Collaboration Tools that You May Not (Yet) Be Using. These five virtual collaboration tools attracted broad readership, and in addition so did the summaries of important research on virtual, multicultural team development. I am hoping that by sharing such information we can heighten awareness of the need for cross-cultural skills, and promote understanding that development of these skills requires discipline and practice.
  3. Our third most popular post of the year was rather surprising to me: 10 Surefire Ways to Divide into Groups. This post gained traction and spread throughout the training and education communities, rather than staying purely within the intercultural space. Perhaps the popularity of this post shows that teachers and trainers are always looking for new-to-them creative techniques. Frankly, I have consulted the list a couple of times myself when designing workshops! It’s so easy to reinforce cross-cultural awareness—even in the ways we divide our learners into small groups.
  4. I am proud that the post on the Benchmark Statement on Intercultural Competence: AEA was among our top five for 2013. It is a terrific example of an organization committing itself to intercultural competence, developing a strategic plan, and investing in competence development over an extended period of time. If you have not read through the American Evaluation Association’s statement, I urge you to do so. As I said in the original post, some of their definitions are better than some of those provided by interculturalists!
  5. Rounding out our top-five blog posts of 2013 was a guest post by Joe Lurie, entitled Catalysts For Intercultural Conversations and Insights: Advertisements. Joe authored several of our most popular blog posts last year, all focused on food and eating. In 2013 his top post focused on print- and video-advertising and how to use them in a classroom environment to compare and contrast cultures. As always, Joe, thank you for your contributions to this community, and to building intercultural competence!

A big and very sincere THANK YOU to all our guest bloggers in 2013, and to those whose work we re-posted. And many thanks, also, to those who contributed comments and additional resources, either directly here on the blog, or via our pages on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Our community now numbers about 14,000 people, including 130 authors, 420 certified facilitators, a solid group of experienced customers, and an ever-growing group of users and collaborators. Together we can achieve our goals to develop intercultural respect, understanding and collaboration!

We welcome posts by those of you who wish to reach out to our community and aid us in developing intercultural competence in this world of ours. Please contact me about requirements and benefits.

If you are curious what the Cultural Detective project is all about, join us for one of our twice-monthly complimentary webinars. Subscribing to Cultural Detective Online or licensing our print materials does not require certification, but even the most experienced coaches, teachers and trainers rave about our Facilitator Certification Workshops. Sign up for one near you today!

Finally, we would also like to extend our sincere thanks and bring your attention to those who have most frequently referred new readers to this blog in 2013. These, of course, include social media, search engines (Google, Yahoo…), and content curation sites (Scoop.it, Paper.li, Clipboard) that I have not included in the list below. However, this top-15 list shows the broad diversity of contexts and applications for the Cultural Detective Method and materials:

  1. feel like you belong: sharing the life stories of immigrants, expatriates, and refugees to the United States
  2. Expat Everyday Support Center: we help expats connect to their worlds
  3. Zest n Zen/Anne Egros, Intercultural Executive Coach: Global Leadership, International Career, Expat Life, Intercultural Communication
  4. Jenny Ebermann: coach, trainer, speaker, consultant
  5. Slovensko drustvo evalvatorjev
  6. Worldwise: intercultural training and services
  7. KQED: public media for Northern California
  8. InCulture Parent: for parents raising little global citizens
  9. Vekantiebabbels.nl: voor het uitwisselen van je vakantieverhalen
  10. Southeast Schnitzel: interpreting German-American differences in the Tennessee Valley and beyond
  11. Intercultural Humanities Manchester
  12. The Intercultural Communication Center: its all about communication
  13. Global Minds: consultoría en Colombia
  14. Blogos: news and views on languages and technology
  15. ESL: language studies abroad

Thank you all for joining us in this grand endeavor! We hope to see you, dear readers, on this list next year. Let us know what is on your mind, and how this blog can you help further intercultural competence in your corner of the world! Happy New Year!

Catalysts For Intercultural Conversations and Insights: Advertisements

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Lipton tea Chinese flowersThis guest blog post is written by Joe Lurie, Executive Director Emeritus, University of California Berkeley’s International House.
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Recently, I taught a course attended by Chinese and French students on the intercultural challenges of marketing across cultures. Midway through the course I asked students to select a print, web or YouTube ad describing how the following items reflected cultural preoccupations, values and behaviors in their cultures:

  • the product being promoted
  • the selection of words in the headers
  • the images and colors being used to reinforce the message

After analyzing the ad as a reflection of one’s culture, the student was to ask a fellow classmate from another culture why the ad would or would not work in their culture. In one example, a Chinese student demonstrated how Lipton tea is marketed in China. He noted that no tea bag was explicitly shown, as tea bags do not speak to the traditional way of preparing tea in China, and so not the best way to convince people to drink the Lipton product in China. Rather, the image was of green tea flowing from a cup on its side, producing green images in the style of Chinese paintings of mountains, fish and flowers, each with a particular symbolic value in Chinese culture. Lipton tea Chinese mountains The French student who was interviewed had no exposure to traditional Chinese painting and saw not lovely images, but rather incomprehensible splotches! He added that the ad would not work in France as tea drinkers are generally accustomed to black or brown teas.

Color in many other ads revealed the power and status implications of yellow in China, yet something to beware of in France where it often suggests infidelity. Below from a French student are two different ways that Volkswagon is promoted in China and France, reflecting a powerful individualistic/collectivistic contrast, and a terrific way for students to engage in a conversation of cultural discovery: Below you will find an ad for a cleaning sponge selected by a French student, revealing what the student felt is a preoccupation with sex—reflected in explicit and other seductive ways in many other ads for other products in France. Sexual suggestions, so graphically portrayed, would not, according to the Chinese students in my class, be acceptable in Chinese product promotions. And in a French ad for BMW, a man is  shown making love to the body of a woman whose face is in fact a BMW!

BaijuuA Chinese ad for a very strong 38% alcohol rice beverage portrayed a bottle whose shape was interpreted by the French as a perfume bottle, and so it would not be a convincing way of promoting an alcoholic beverage there.

The bold red color signifying affluence and status for the Chinese was seen as over the top by the French students, who noted a preference in the French aesthetic for far more nuanced, muted colors. This prompted a spirited conversation between the Chinese and French in which it was revealed that ads with very high alcoholic content are discouraged or banned in France, but visual ads for condoms were common there, though not generally acceptable in China. That conversation ended with a comparison of toasting custom—the French “drink and sip” vs the Chinese GAMBAY or “bottoms up”—ALL at ONCE!

Should readers of this blog try this approach in their intercultural classes and training sessions, I hope you will consider sharing the fun and insights here….

—Joe Lurie
Executive Director Emeritus at the University of California’s International House, Joe is currently a cross-cultural communications consultant, university instructor and Cultural Detective certified facilitator. Contact Joe via email or LinkedIn.