• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, November 11, 2010

While attending Publicis' Monaco Media Forum this week, I was a bit taken aback when a representative of a massive global technology company, referring to the company's recent roll-out of a new product to international markets, used the acronym "EMEA" for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. This, of course, to a room of EMEAns.

Now, no one has ever accused me of being the most globally aware and culturally sensitive person around. I grew up in a small town where the last immigrants to show up en mass were Italians in the early 1900s. I only speak one language with any kind of fluency, despite the fact that my wife and daughters are Mexican and speak only Spanish to each other in our home. I didn't possess a passport until I was 32-years-old and had to travel to Switzerland to close an investment in my first company, Real Media. Since then, I have traveled extensively abroad and grown sensitive to how Americans think and talk about their businesses in non-U.S. markets.

I continue to be amazed at how -- like the speaker at the Media Forum -- many U.S. companies and their employees fall into using shorthand and acronyms when describing their global activities. For example, it is easy to use the term "Latin America" when talking about countries in Central and South America. Of course, once you spend time in those countries, you learn that there is an enormous diversity of people and cultures there. Only in Miami are there Latin Americans. In South America, they are Chileans and Brazilians and Colombians.

Does this matter? Why shouldn't we use simple terms like Latin America or EMEA  to describe collections of countries or regions in the world? I believe that it does matter, and that we can do better. Here are two reasons why:

Respect for peoples' identity. While many Argentinians may recognize that they are among the group of peoples that Napoleon tagged as "Latin," they are first and foremost Argentinians and are very proud about it.  Likewise, few English out there like to call themselves European, let alone consider themselves EMEAns. History has repeatedly shown that the first step in dehumanizing "other" people is to broadly label them so that they can be stereotyped. It is easier to discriminate against people without faces and individual personalities.

It reminds you to put yourself in your customers' shoes. We all talk about wanting to think from our customers' perspective, but few of us do as good a job of that as we would like. Catching yourself before you use shorthand terms to describe vast numbers of very different peoples is a good way to remind yourself that labels matter to them. Within the broad label or acronym, there may be hundred, if not thousands, of ethnic and cultural differences that make a difference in how you are heard or how your marketing or product may be perceived.

Does this mean I believe that you shouldn't talk about European market activities without naming each and every of the four dozen or so counties in the region? Of course not. Nor do I think that with the Middle East or Africa. However, I do believe that saying something like, "We launched across Europe, the Middle East and Africa" is far better than overusing a too-simplifying acronym.

We are all part of the global economy now. We can't afford to think of the world as the U.S. -- and then everybody else. Cultural and ethnic sensitivity is simply part of the price of successfully doing business around the world. What do you think?