Planning communications for your home market is easy. But how confident are you that the same approach you use at home will work when you expand your business overseas?

Situation

Many companies have a standard set of marketing and promotional materials, product and service brochures, catalogs, Powerpoint slides, etc. These are prepared for use in common corporate communications situations such as trade shows, conferences, and sales meetings.
The purpose of these materials is to introduce your company to prospective customers, business partners, vendors, and so on. Usually there is some underlying purpose beyond that, such as:

• Building trust and removing doubts
• Attracting interest in certain products or services
• Establishing experience and capability
• Demonstrating your company’s ability to collaborate with foreign partners
• Proving financial stability
• Illustrating your company’s market penetration and customer base at home and abroad

Complications

1. Because of the many functions that this promotional material is required to perform, the information density in each document is often extremely high and the key message becomes obscured, causing confusion for your target audience.
2. Due to a lack of time for preparation and little or no experience presenting to overseas audiences, your representatives may try to handle the overseas audience the same way they would handle a domestic one. As a result, they deliver a confusing and often boring message. They may also be hit with a lot of tough questions, or worse still, receive no questions at all (which would indicate a total lack of interest).

Challenge

• How can you create reliable and reusable communications resources that require little or no effort to adapt for use for overseas communications?

• How can you avoid costly and embarrassing mistakes in critical business communications?

Solution

We now understand that planning for effective communications must begin long before we get up in front of our audience to present our ideas or proposals, and that persuasive business communication requires much more than simply good language and presentation skills. In fact, many business presentations are doomed from the start because the speaker hasn’t understood his/her audience’ needs, concerns or existing relationships or the competition against whom the offer will be compared.

As a result we look at the structure and planning of communication from three interrelated perspectives:

• The Context: here the aim is to increase our client’s strategic advantage by looking at how we can proactively change the context in which the communication takes place. By knowing the competitive environment in which the message will be sent and other messages it will be compared against, we can design a message that will be much more favorable. The power and expectations of the audience (customer) must also be considered as well as any historical relationships. Political, reputational and environmental issues can also have an impact on the receptiveness of the audience to a particular message.
• The Value Proposition: is where, by means of a systematic analysis, we look for ways in which we can increase the amount of value that the presenter can bring to the audience and how the perceived cost of the offer can be simultaneously reduced in the mind of the audience.
• The Impact: here we work with the client and our understanding of the their target audience’ requirements and culture to design a method and style of delivery that will have the biggest impact and be most memorable and persuasive.