George Pitcher argues that international marketers are going to have to pay greater heed to the new American psyche if they are to engage successfully with US audiences and markets.
LIKE L.P. HARTLEY’S PAST, AMERICA IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY: they do things differently there. More accurately, in so many areas of politics and trade, America is our future – and, as they do things differently there, we’d do well to pay attention. Some of it is bound to be coming here.
Tony Blair’s prime ministerial style has been labelled presidential by British commentators so consistently and his support for American imperialism so widely recorded – especially when Iraq became the issue – that there is a widespread assumption that we have been annexed as the 51st state. The view is reinforced by Europhiliac writers, most trenchantly byWill Hutton’s sequel to his New Labour curtain-raiser, TheWorldWe’re In, and by Little-Englander Americaphobes of both Left and Right.
But there remain essential differences, legacies of the two nations divided by a common language.These differences are most apparent in the communications universes of America and Britain and are defined by operational, as well as cultural and constitutional, factors.
The faith and trust that Americans invest in commercial institutions, at the expense of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), sets up an entirely separate order of social responses to messages and consequently prescribes a variety of communications styles that are, metaphorically as well as literally, foreign to European audiences.
Historically, this difference has been most marked in attitudes to the business of brands. In its second annual Study of NGO and Institutional Credibility in 2002, Edelman PRWorldwide and researchers StrategyOne examined relative trust in brands in the US and Europe. In America, the top five most trusted were, in descending order, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Bayer and Ford Motor Company, with trust ratings ranging from 47% to 56%. In Europe, the top three were Amnesty International, WorldWildlife Fund for Nature (WWFN) and Greenpeace, with massive ratings of between 62% and 76%. It’s only at fourth and fifth place that you find Microsoft and Ford, with relatively measly ratings of 46% and 36% respectively. In America, WWFN ranked seventh, between Nike and Dow Chemical, with 43%. Amnesty and Greenpeace were 10th and 11th, with 40% and 38%.
It may be that NGOs have strengthened their brands and are approaching parity, in credibility terms, with business and government in the US, while simply maintaining an earlier established dominance in Europe, as Richard Edelman argued was the bottom line when he presented the research in NewYork. This view would be supported by more recent evidence that NGOs are making ground in perception terms in the US. But I’m still not so sure.
It is at least possible that Americans have an ingrained trust and respect for business (and government, as it happens), combined with a low regard for environmentalists, that simply isn’t matched in Europe.This would offer a partial explanation for the apparent contempt displayed by GeorgeW. Bush’s government for the Kyoto environmental accord and his personal boycott of the Earth Summit in Johannesburg. It’s said that Bush’s response to charges that the US is responsible for 25% of the world’s atmospheric pollution is to sniff the air and remark “It smells okay to me”.
This support for the interests of industry and commerce over the concerns of environmentalists dictates an approach to the communications process that is at wide variance to the European model.The style of communications approach to NGOs from the business community in the States is one of attack and oppression. Environmentalists and, to a lesser degree, social reformers are the enemy. These are not “crusties” (as ecowarriors are known in Britain) and tree-hugging hippies, the American argument goes, but highly organised, efficiently funded and politically motivated operators.The challenge is not one of accommodation and engagement, but of challenge and repression. So America is peculiarly constituted for “us and them” communications struggles, whether between Republicans and Democrats (still distinguishable in a way that parties battling for the middle-ground of politics in Europe are not), between corporations and their attackers or, more recently, between America itself and most of the rest of the world.
The terrorist atrocities of 9/11 will increasingly be perceived as strategic failures. If the attack was to cause new generations of indigenous Muslims to rise in jihad against the corrupt and corruptingWest, then the attempt was a disappointment for its perpetrators.Western Muslim youth either looked on in horror and fear of reprisal, or shrugged its shoulders and went back to its Sony Gameboy.
But, post-9/11, the characteristics of American “us and them” attitudes have understandably hardened, domestically and on the world stage. Eco-warriors or any other kind of alternative activist are not only likely to be “nailed” in the historically robust environment of American commercial or political debate, but to be seen as anti- American.The same applies abroad – perhaps even more so.
The challenge for Europeans – as for the populations of other continents – is to accommodate American attitudes and the communications techniques that purvey them. It’s not mandatory to do so. But not to do so is to alienate land-masses and their populations from the largest and most powerful economy on earth.Whether it is desirable to do so is largely irrelevant – America is a fact, not an option.
It follows that those with a professional responsibility for international communications in Europe are charged with taking America gently by the arm and leading it into different and challenging environments.
The cultural and national fragmentation of Europe, even with the growing centralisation and federalism of the European Commission and the euro-zone, offers an entirely alien legislative, regulatory, political and commercial environment into which American corporations are to operate.
Wherever one stands on the concept of Europe, the opportunity for the management of transatlantic communications is a considerable one. For those who are any good at it, it should also be a highly lucrative one.
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