Commentary

Are You An EMEAn?

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?

commentary

2 comments about "Are You An EMEAn?".

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Nick Drew from Yahoo Canada, November 11, 2010 at 12:10 p.m.
As a Brit, this really does seem to be a column about not very much... Sure, the term 'EMEA' is much more a reflection of corporate structure than geographical identity (although countries such as Israel still qualify as 'Europe' for the purposes of football tournaments); but if you're in a meeting with reps from the Middle East and talk about how the European team did x, y or z, they get a little het up, and point out that it's the EMEA team.
Your final conclusion (that US-based global firms are guilty of seeing the world as 'US' and 'everywhere else') is so very true (and merits a column of its own), but the point preceding it, about using the phrase 'Europe, Middle East and Africa' rather than EMEA is just.... pointless!
Still, it provokes debate, which is never a bad thing :)
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David Hawthorne from HCI LearningWorks, November 11, 2010 at 1:25 p.m.

As an American in global business since 1969, I found the EMEA nomenclature unremarkable. I heard it just as often from my Japanese, Dutch, British, Saudi, South African (yeah, I know), Indonesian, Singaporean, Chilean and Chinese colleagues as I heard it among Yanks. In fact, if you want to get into it about over-generalization, try getting a handle on the ethnic, religious, and class distinctions that make up the fabric of Singapore. EMEA had more to do with trading blocks and logistical flows then it did with culture and language. (We had AP and the Americas too.) I don't recall a single use in which the inhabitants were consciously lumped together ...unless of course I think back to growing up in my little all-white, mostly protestant, blue-collar town of 2500 people in South Jersey.

There "lumping together" was normal. "Those people" was all that was needed to describe anyone "not from here." Indeed, living abroad for a number of years, I soon discovered that almost everyplace was almost exactly like my little town. Distinctions (mostly negative) were allotted to accents, religions, occupations, clothing, hair color, hair texture, skin tone, diet, beverage, music, and sports preferences. (Heck, in my little town, we were suspicious of people who lived on the other side of the tracks even though they were ostensibly in the same ethnic, economic, and religions clusters as we were.)

Now I live in NYC. I love it here. I can't understand 70% of the languages I hear just walking down the street. (Of course, neighborhoods have a somewhat different dynamic as do peculiar social structures like my co-op board that picks through the minutiae of anyone who might want to live in the building. It's the highlight of their day I think whenever they can render a thumbs up or down like Roman senators at the arena.)

Here's the bottom line: Humans naturally lump and cluster stuff. It's a normal cognitive process used to cope with complicated situations. There's no harm in the lumping and clustering unless we lend too much significance to our lumps and clusters and confuse complicatedness with complexity. To deal with complexity one actually has to deeply consider 'what is' because whatever 'it is,' is adapting to the same conditions. Your understanding of your perceptions will result in a dance or a fight. It's your choice.