144 Part 2 The Cultural Environment of Global Markets culture depends heavily on the contextual (who says it, when it is said, how it is said) or nonverbal aspects of communication, whereas the low-context culture depends more on explicit, verbally expressed communications.35 A brief exemplar of the high-/low-context dimension of communication style regards an international marketing executive’s description of a Los Angeles business entertainment event: “I picked him a German client up at his hotel near LAX and asked what kind of food he wanted for dinner. He said, ‘Something local.’ Now in LA local food is Mexican food. I’d never met anyone that hadn’t had a taco before! We went to a great Mexican place in Santa Monica and had it all, guacamole, salsa, enchiladas, burritos, a real Alka-Seltzer kind of night. When we were done I asked how he liked the food. He responded rather blandly, ‘It wasn’t very good.’” The American might have been taken aback by his client’s honest, and perhaps too direct, answer. However, the American knew well about German frankness36 and just rolled with the “blow.” Germans, being very low-context oriented, just deliver the information without any social padding. Most Americans would soften the blow some with an answer more like, “It was pretty good, but maybe a bit too spicy.” And a high-context oriented Japanese would really pad the response with something like, “It was very good. Thanks.” But then the Japanese would never order Mexican food again. An American or German might view the Japanese response as less than truthful, but from the Japanese perspective, he was just preserving a harmonious relationship. Indeed, the Japanese have two words for truth, honne (true mind) and tatemae (official stance).37 The former delivers the information, and the latter preserves the relationship. And in high-context Japan, the latter is often more important. Even eye contact varies among cultures—Americans tend to look one another in the eye during conversations, whereas Asians do so when they have a direct response to your comment or question.38 Fur-thermore, in bilingual contexts, people tend to express strong opinions in their native tongue and less emotional statements in their second language.39 Lack of understand-ing of such differences in expression can hamper understanding and even a company’s performance.40 Internet Communications. The message on a business-to-business website is an extension of the company and should be as sensitive to business customs as any other company representative would be. Once a message is posted, it can be read anywhere, at any time. As a consequence, the opportunity to convey an unintended message is infinite. Nothing about the Web will change the extent to which people identify with their own languages and cultures; thus, language should be at the top of the list when examining the viability of a company’s website. Estimates are that 78 percent of today’s website content is written in English, but an English e-mail message cannot be understood by 35 percent of all Internet users. A study of businesses on the European continent highlights the need for companies to respond in the languages of their websites. One-third of the European senior managers surveyed said they would not tolerate English online. They do not believe that middle managers can use English well enough to transact business on the Internet. 35Bloomberg Businessweek, “Office Cultures: A Global Guide,” June 13, 2013, p. 15. 36Interestingly, the etymology of the term “frankness” has to do with the Franks, an ancient Germanic tribe that settled along the Rhine. This is not mere coincidence; it’s history again influencing symbols (that is, language)! 37James D. Hodgson, Yoshihiro Sano, and John L. Graham, Doing Business with the New Japan (Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). 38Erin Meyer, “Looking Another Culture in the Eye,” The New York Times, September 14, 2014, p. 8. 39Catherine L. Caldwell-Harris, “Kill One to Save Five? In Another Language, Your Own Thoughts May Be Foreign to You,” Scientific American Mind, September–October 2014, pp. 71–73. 40Adrei Kuzenetsov and Olga Kuznetsova, “Building Professional Discourse in Emerging Markets: Language, Context, and the Challenge of Sensemaking,” Journal of International Business Studies 45 (2014), pp. 583–99.
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