The age of connectivity has made the world far smaller than it used to be. While the ease of cultural exchange has cultivated our sense of shared humanity, it has also made it easier to accidentally step on another culture’s toes. For marketers, the consequences go far beyond a mere faux pas, potentially tanking the perception of a brand and turning an attempt at audience expansion into a retreat from backlash.
We Can’t Be Blind To Our Blind Spots
Every marketing team has its blind spots, which means every marketing team is at risk of creating a campaign that, whether through ignorance of cultural sensitivities or reliance on stereotypes, causes offense. The risk is greater the more homogeneous the marketing team, especially those who have worked together for a long time and may have developed habitual ways of working that make it harder to see a campaign from an outside perspective.
These blind spots become a liability as soon as the team is marketing to a culture outside their own. The possibility that marketers will unwittingly cause offense is only increasing as barriers to global trade come down, allowing more and more products and services to be sold and marketed across borders. As brands go global, they need to be able to take on a global perspective.
Global mobility means greater audience diversity within borders too. The danger here is not just offending the sensibilities of a group that the marketing team had not considered, but also that group sharing their offense with friends and relatives in their countries of origin. One family WhatsApp group could be all it takes to trigger a consumer backlash in a country that was not even targeted in the campaign to begin with.
There’s No Compliance For Cultural Offense
Content moderation and legal compliance can lull marketers into a false sense of security. Such frameworks exist to ensure that an advert abides by local regulations, but a legal team signing off on a campaign does not protect it from causing offense. There is no set code that can account for a culture’s history, sacred symbols and collective traumas. This can only be gleaned by seeking the perspectives and input of not just the audience being targeted, but people familiar with the broader cultural context they exist within.
For example, a Ukrainian could advise a bouquet delivery company not to display arrangements with an even number of flowers, which are associated with mourning. A foot cream advertised in Thailand would have to be careful not to show the soles of the model’s feet; a significant breach of local etiquette.
It’s easy to see how any of the above examples could accidentally make their way into a campaign without there being any ill intent behind it. The chance for such stumbles has multiplied with AI generation, where an even greater lack of human oversight makes it more likely for offensive imagery to creep into a campaign, and consumers won’t care that a machine was responsible.
Regardless of intent, these hypothetical marketers would quickly find themselves having to withdraw and replan their creative at best, or find themselves facing a consumer backlash.
Not All Backlashes Are A Backfire
The severity of a backlash is not just in the offense caused, but in the wider societal structure where it occurs. In more individualist and secular countries, a brand might be able to reclaim its standing through consumer-focused PR and suffering any penalties levied by regulators. But in more collectivist countries, particularly those with strong religious authorities, those in power may feel compelled to join the backlash, without any recourse for remediation for the brand.
The danger of being unaware of cultural sensitivities is not just triggering a backlash, but this backlash coming as a surprise. Suddenly, a brand finds itself on the back foot, trying to correct a situation that could have been prevented with more due diligence. This is assuming they notice: It may be days before marketers realize a storm is brewing on social media, and in today’s world, it only takes days for a brand’s reputation to suffer lasting damage.
With cultural awareness comes the ability to anticipate potential backlash and either make a decision in advance not to address it, because the backlash would originate from outside the audience being targeted, or to make the backlash a means of drawing further attention to the campaign.
Take Gillette’s “The Best a Man Can Be” campaign, which encouraged men and boys to challenge harmful male behavior. It attracted a massive backlash among conservatives, including calls to boycott Procter & Gamble. However, they proved to be a loud but vocal minority who spun a media circus around what was ultimately a well-received campaign that uplifted brand sentiment and consideration for the average consumer.
A Quick Cultural Sensitivity Checklist
As legal and compliance frameworks can’t protect marketers from causing cultural offense, reducing risk is a matter of mindfulness. Marketers aren’t expected to be anthropologists, but they must take responsibility for seeking outside perspective in a multigenerational, multiethnic, multicultural and geopolitically tumultuous world. You may still wade into hot water, but at least you will be prepared for it.
At MGID, we recommend asking the following six questions before launching a global campaign:
- Could local audiences interpret this differently than we do?
- Does this creative rely on a stereotype?
- Are we using symbols or references without understanding their meaning?
- Could this message be interpreted politically or socially?
- Has the campaign been reviewed through a local cultural lens?
- Is it worth caring about from an economic perspective?
It is also worth seeking advice from specialists on cultural sensitivity. In the end, successful marketing has always been a matter of empathy. Put yourself in the perspective of your prospective customer, and create a campaign that taps into their desires and their fears, their wants and their needs. If you realize that a perspective is too different for you to be able to inhabit it, seek the advice of someone who can.
