To help local employees acclimatize, the Hub has 35 employees, including expatriates from several countries. Generally, they lean on inputs from marketing teams on the ground in the 40-odd countries they service to alert them to cultural sensitivities. For instance, the use of a yellow bulb in the Ideas Everywhere campaign had to be reworked in Turkey, where the bulb was the symbol of a political party.
Cultural sensitivity is a point of issue with the Hub’s partners as well. At O&M, Bangalore, there are five-six expatriates on the team.
Even as team members juggle with at least 12 time zones and build relationships with clients across cultures, this experiment in building a multicultural marketing communications team is clearly one that is piquing interest. “There was really no precedent for such a model globally until the Lenovo Hub in Bangalore was set up but this is a model that we expect will grow exponentially in the future,” says Malani.
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