Note: This blog is intended to illustrate the importance of cultural awareness in the graphic design and marketing industry. Please do not take offense.
Cultural awareness is extremely important in the graphic design and marketing industry because it is our job to communicate or convey a message properly. We must be sensitive to other cultures as they may interpret the message in a different way. What is considered appropriate in one culture may be completely inappropriate in another. When working for a company or as a freelance designer, we must have tolerance to diversity and increase both self-awareness as well as cross-culture awareness. Without this awareness, advertisements or campaigns can lead to blunders with damaging consequences. Both the success and failure of your product may rely on cultural awareness.
hmmmmm.
Locum, a Swedish medical company sends out Christmas cards to their customers. In 1991 they decided to give their logo a little holiday spirit by replacing the “o” in Locum with a heart. The result looked something like this and the Christmas card took on an entirely different meaning here in America.
During its 1994 launch campaign, the telecom company Orange had to change its ads in Northern Ireland. “The future’s bright … the future’s Orange.” That campaign is an advertising legend. However, in the North the term Orange suggests the Orange Order. The implied message that the future is bright, the future is Protestant, loyalist… didn’t sit well with the Catholic Irish population.
Crayola has changed color names over time due to the civil rights movement and other social pressures. In 1962, Binney & Smith replaced flesh with peach, in recognition of the wide variety of skin tones. More recently, in 1999, they changed Indian red to chestnut. The color was not named after Native Americans; it was actually named for a special pigment that came from India.
Peace, Victory, Rabbit Ears or “UP YOURS!”
I once designed a cover to a magazine where a photo of a little girl in a parade was giving a high peace sign (also considered a V as in victory). As children often do – the peace sign was backwards, thus her palm was facing herself. An employee came into our office just as the proofs of the cover were ready to go to press and said, “Where I am from (England), that little girl would be saying, “F*** You, or at the very least, Up Yours.” We had to quickly rethink whether or not we should use the photo as the cover. In sensitivity to others, we decided to use the photo in a much smaller version inside the magazine, but chose a different shot for the cover of the magazine. This insulting meaning also occurs in many English-speaking countries outside of North America.
In 2002, Umbro, the UK sports brand had to withdraw its new tennis shoe line called the Zyklon (German for Cyclone). The firm received complaints from many organizations and individuals, as it was the name of the gas used by the Nazi regime to murder millions of Jews in concentration camps. The connection of the word Zyklon to the concentration camps could have been found easily by typing the word into the Internet. Had Umbro done their homework on cross-culture awareness, they could have saved both time/money as well as the unnecessary grief of others.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2222783.stm
http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/cultural-services
