Last December an article in The Economist discussing advertising to ethnic minorities caught my attention. The article discusses at one point how “ethnic origin is the key to people’s identity, much more than education, income, religion, sex and sexual orientation.”
This is of high interest to someone like me as it echoes what I see and hear when talking about internationalization with small business owners who come from a U.S. ethnic minority. For example, many African Americans voice an interest in promoting their products in Sub-Saharan African nations. Most of my interlocutors have never been to Ghana or Zaire, but they feel a deep connection to those places and seem to instinctively know that Ghanaians or Zairians would be interested in their products or services. This gives them the audacity to get out of their comfort zone and start their expansion efforts.
My Hispanic clients often still have connections in their home country and already tested their products by taking it to aunts and cousins who remain in the home country. They also often already identified a possible distributor or agent through the large social network of their family. Chinese and Koreans are even often more involved with their homeland community and will invest their money in their home country by building a commercial outlet that will give economic viability to their family back home while building an international presence for their brand. The Greeks are not too shabby at internationalization either. Look at Arianna Huffington: in less than two years, she expanded her on-line newspaper to Canada, England, and France. The world is her oyster.
The multicultural and multilingual approach these ethnic groups bring to the commercial equation make them think internationally from day one. They don’t feel that they have to learn to walk before they run or that they may take on a bigger risk by opening a commercial entity in Seoul rather than Los Angeles.
Reading those lines, you may feel that of course people who are connected to their family back home have a leg up on you. The truth is, if you ask, they might be more than willing to share their network and multicultural approach to business in their home country–but you will have to learn to LISTEN to them and FOLLOW their advices and recommendations.
Too often clients of mine realize they need someone in house to make that connection with the country they wish to penetrate. What they don’t realize is that they seldom empower the Vietnamese or Nigerian employee to lead the business the way it should be led in Hanoi or Abuja. Executives want access to the language mainly, while wanting to remain in control of the management and negotiation styles. Seldom do they realize there is a business know-how in each culture that differs from theirs and that must be engaged in order to connect with potential buyers.
High-caliber multinationals have noticed, and many are now working on decentralizing their management, empowering each country to lead the way it sees fit culture by culture.
You, however, don’t need to be a multinational to take advantage of the infinite power of international sales. What you need, big or small, is the capacity to admit that there is more than one way to skin a cat. And you must trust people from different cultural backgrounds to teach you how to do it in their own country so your business can be recognized as a business that belongs and feels natural to the locals.


