| Matthew |
Hello and welcome to Globally Speaking. I’m Matthew Cottingham, Program Director at RWS Moravia. My team does content production work for large enterprise customers. Today, we’re focusing on culturalization. Culturalization reaches beyond the business of language translation into an understanding of a culture’s background, stories and cultural beliefs. By gaining a deeper understanding of a country or people in a specific geography, businesses can be more effective in designing products, services and communications for those customers. With us today is Chui Chui Tan, founder and director of Beyō Global. Chui Chui is an expert in culturalization. She travels, presents and partners with businesses to help them be more effective in cultural understanding. Let’s have Chui Chui introduce herself. |
| Chui Chui |
First of all, thanks for having me here. I’m Chui Chui Tan. I’m founder and director of Beyō Global. I have been in the customer experience and user experience industry for over 14 years. What I have been doing is I’ve been helping companies to bring them closer to their global customers; so, to help them to better understand how their international customers experience and perceive or would perceive their products and services in different countries.
I have worked with different companies from big organizations such as Fortify, Asana and TransUnion as well as small startups and midweight companies as well.
The whole point of me helping them is actually to make sure that we can provide a high-quality experience for their customers in all corners of the world and to ensure parity of experience. |
| Matthew |
Maybe you can talk to me a little bit about culturalization. I know it’s a big part of your repertoire and what you do. So maybe you can talk to me about what does that mean and when you introduce culturalization to your customers, how do you frame it for them? I think that you have a framework for that as well and how you talk with them. |
| Chui Chui |
Yeah. Cool. So when I started talking about culturalization, before I used this term, actually I was talking about localization and I realized that there’s a lot of companies out there [that] refer [to] localization as more to do with translations of the language itself, or tailor the content of their products or services to their local audiences through translations. And it’s very, very much to do with language and content, whereas culturalization is completely different. So, it kind of involves going extra miles not only to deliver culturally appropriate, meaningful content or design to the people around the world, but also to understand how best to communicate with them and provide them with a great experience.
So, it’s not just about content or language but it’s more about, you know, understanding the local users, their context and then touch upon different areas. For example, once you understand the local customers and what they need, their motivations, their behaviors, their frustrations, and so as even bigger context, in terms of their history, their infrastructure and their economy of the countries, then that will help your company to define not just the design itself—like I say, a layer—but also the marketing strategy, the brand propositions, the operations side of it. |
| Matthew |
I’m really interested in this ‘content in context’ or ‘business in context.’ You used the word ‘context’ a couple of times. Talk to me about how you help companies fit their business vision or their products or their services into the right context. Is it a change of mindset that the company needs to have or is it a matter of changing the products or services to fit into that context? Talk to me a little more about that. |
| Chui Chui |
So, I’ll break your questions in two. So, context…the way I define context here is more to do with, you know, the environment of the users or your customers that are going to use your product and service. So, the context could be their environment, the way they interact with their society. Or it could be the context in terms of the infrastructure of a country; for example, the speed of the internet, how advanced their infrastructure is in terms of technology. Or it could be economy size: you know, the context of how much money individuals have or are they being paid daily or monthly or annually. So, that will define how they go about behaving and buying or paying for products. So, this context is kind of like the user itself and then the things around them, the environment around them.
So, I’ll give you an example like, I think [in] 2018, a few big organizations and companies like Marriott, ZARA and Delta Airlines, they made a mistake of putting Tibet and Taiwan as individual countries.
So, that kind of is an example of geopolitical mistakes that a company could make. If you get this respect establishment level wrong, it could very easily damage your business and [it’s] very hard to recover from it as well. So, once you have established a basic respect and trust with a brand, then you want to move on to the cultural expectations level.
So, what does that mean? It will be something that, well, basic elements that you want to make sure that you get right. So, you get it wrong, it might hinder your customers’ experience in using a product or service. So, it could be as simple as the pound signs or the US dollar signs—you know, the currency signs. It could be the use of icons or it could be the use of metrics, for example, centimeters or miles or feet. So, these are the basic things to get right. All these things will help you make the experience better.
But then the next level is about experience enhancing. So, this is where you can help your business or product stand out from the competitors. So, this is where the things that I talk about the context, the history, the elements and everything else and how will that help you to define what your product should be.
When we talk about the enhancement in terms of the experience aspect, it could possibly be, you know, for example, I went out to work with Spotify in different countries. I work with them for at least 12 to 13 different countries with different teams. And some of the elements we could learn about are how the propositions team and conversion team could use the insights that we get out from the research we do to define how they can kind of have a very different subscription model, for example, for different markets. So that is some examples of that. Or you could go into a market and understand how business could do in terms of understanding what are the best things to communicate with them.
So, you probably have 10 features in your products, for example. So, maybe in Russia, features A, B, C might be very important to the specific market. So, when you have your marketing materials, you might want to say, okay, for Russians, you might want to have the ABC features be on your website and your marketing materials. But when you go to, for example, Mexico, the things that are important to them might be other things. It might be features C, D and E, so that helps you to actually understand what other things you should put in your marketing strategy. There is also the example that—I think there’s a documentary about that—about IKEA as well. When they go into India, they actually spent a few years having teams embedded and living in India for a long time as well to understand various things.
So, the things they think about are not just making changes to the products that you’re selling, because colors are very important, maybe leather is not as useful as a material for that market, but also how they go about changing the layout of their stores. For example, they know that Indian women are a bit shorter than Europeans and Americans, so they kind of showcase the cabinets and countertops at the lower heights. Or they know that actually, Indian families, they actually spend a lot of time together. So, relatives will kind of pop in and pop out, and so they need to have more folding chairs and stools so they can sell a bit more products on their side. So, there’s a lot of elements that you can look into, not just on the product itself, but also operations and marketing and business strategy, that we talk about. |
| Matthew |
I know you spend a lot of time on the ground and in the air going to different countries and seeing things. How much do you enjoy being on the ground in new locations or places you are familiar with, and how much do you spend in the data and the analysis, the business intelligence side of things? How do you balance that and keeping yourself fresh for the customers and giving them the information that they need? |
| Chui Chui |
Hmm. So, yeah. Yeah, I do travel quite a bit. So, actually, when it comes to understanding your customers and also interpret that kind of insights and information that you have about your customers into something more tangible and actionable, there are a lot of different ways to do that. So, it could be actually using the data, because nowadays there is so much data you can collect about a market itself. So, like, big organizations, they might have a lot of data they collected from their data team or their marketing team and everything else. Or actually, there are a lot of analytics that you can get even from your website. So those are a lot of data that normally is scattered around in different formats and different resources.
So, one of the things I sometimes help businesses with, whether it’s a big organization, small organization, is to say okay, let’s take all the insights, information or knowledge, or even sometimes it’s kind of subjective views from their local team or their local sales representatives and everything, and so kind of gather everything to help them to access and review what they know already.
So, normally what I do is kind of take that information and data, whether they’re valid or not valid, and then I kind of review them and put them into four main buckets. So, the first bucket would be facts. So, we know this information is true and we are very sure 100% is facts that we can work towards. And then the second category that I normally will put this information into is kind of weak hypotheses; it’s kind of like oh, you kind of know a bit, but not sure whether it’s true, and maybe you know some information, but what does that mean? You need to dig deep into that further.
And then the third category will be strong hypotheses. So, it’s something that we kind of question and then we want to validate that in more detail. And then fourth is missing opportunities. So, it’s kind of like we don’t know what we don’t know, so we want to find out more.
So, normally, I will have them review all that information and then kind of input a lot more insights that I know already based on my experience and expertise to say okay, there are more we can look into. There are the things that we can put in. So, by then, we can have a framework to say okay, these are the insights you already know or data we already collected, whether in desk research or again from different resources, sources that they found.
And then with that, then we can say okay, facts: what does that mean then to the business? So, what can you act upon right now or in the short- or mid-term plan? And then for the rest, I will then help them to define what is the best way to validate them or to validate those hypotheses or to find out more information to do with those specific details or kind of help them to even know even further. So that’s one of the ways that I sometimes help my clients. And one of the things that we could help them to, to kind of fill in the gap, in terms of the things that they know a bit, but need to know more or they need to be validated, or we want to find out more about so that we can act with a stronger rational behind, then we normally will go in to speak to the users themselves.
Even speaking to the users, it could be a lot of different ways as well. It could be face-to-face interviews, could be remote interviews, it could be getting them to do diary studies, could be observing them doing certain things in the stores or in the context of the type of use of the product that you are selling or serving. So, there are always good things about going on the ground and to the local countries, because then you can start immersing yourself in the environment and to kind of get the firsthand insight into that as well. You talk to the users, it’s great, right? But then to get even more understanding about that, you have to have that mindset in terms of being observant and being willing to kind of explore further to maybe places that you don’t feel comfortable with—you know, like local shops and local areas. As long as you feel safe about that, of course.
Also, one thing I found is about talking to people. Like, I talk to the taxi driver, I talk to people in the shops or out in the street when I sit having meals. I kind of sat there having my meal and another lady was Filipino, she was sitting besides, and we started talking and we combined the two tables into one and we had a conversation. So, I learn so much all the time by talking to people. Of course, sometimes it’s not just a normal talk. I do form into a lot more questions. Like the other day, I went for a walking tour. The tour guide says, “This is a very interesting question, but you ask very hard questions.” |
| Matthew |
Yeah, it’s a kind of a gentle art, and when you’re having those on-the-ground conversations and how forward you push, right, and being interested in how reserved you need to be, it goes back to that respect level you talked about. I love my data, but there’s nothing that really substitutes for hearing what they’re interested in and where I can sort of feel that boundary about what they’re comfortable with. |
| Chui Chui |
Yeah. So, one thing I have been putting together for one of my clients is that kind of understanding the payment scene in a market. So, for example, I’m putting together payment scene kind of insights for Brazil. And so, one of the things I mention in that report, the client is going to say, “Oh, okay, we can do that ourselves. We can just go online and say, okay, what are the payment methods being used at the moment in Brazil? And that is that.” But what is very different from our payments report or research is kind of looking into the insight element. One of the things that I mentioned as well is I don’t use just purely data.
You know, there’s no, like, “80% of people use this;” like, “how many millions of people are using that.” So, that data is useful, but it doesn’t provide a very concrete insight into what does that mean. So, to give you examples, like, you can search online, and then they say credit card usage is very high-registered in Brazil; like, whatever percentage that is, 80% or 90%. But actually, if you use that data itself, that means okay, we can sell our products and provide credit cards as the only or one of the key payment methods. But actually, if you dig deeper, most of those credit cards are not being activated or haven’t had transactions at all. And there are a lot of reasons for that. So, if you just use pure data, sometimes it could be quite dangerous in that sense. |
| Matthew |
Yeah. You don’t get those a-ha moments as well. You don’t get those taxi driver moments or the “I hadn’t thought about it that way” moments with data. You just sort of get the quarterly, “I can use that data point in building my product in this sort of way or this transactional sort of way.” It doesn’t get that human element or the cultural or the local element into it the way that seems really effective to me. |
| Chui Chui |
Yeah. And as well, you know, I was in Brazil last summer and we talked about payment methods as well during that research. But then, when I was doing this expert research for the other clients, so when we’re out there, we talk to user participants. They say, “Okay, I don’t want to use credit cards because I want to be more in control. I want to know how much I pay. Which, to a certain level, it is true and very valid. But what I found from my expert research is that actually, the users might not tell you the whole story as well. Because in Brazil, quite a lot of people actually get credit cards for a few reasons.
One is because they have debt and, you know, like, bad scores, so they are not allowed to apply for any credit cards anymore. But of course, when you’re doing user research, sometimes people will be quite embarrassed to say that, so they wouldn’t tell you the whole story about that. So, that’s why I always, when I do research, when I help my clients in terms of really probably understanding what is happening in one market, it always has to come from very different angles. And it has to come from knowing which aspects, which elements to look into as well so that you can kind of pull the right information in and then kind of link them together and put them as a story that makes sense.
I think my approach is always about having a holistic view about a country and their context. Either it could be a holistic view about the payment scene, it could be a holistic view about a certain element, but it has to be providing you with a complete view or insights into what you are looking into as well. |
| Matthew |
Yeah, I love you use the word “stories,” that really resonates with me and telling the story in the way that the people want to hear and are ready to hear, on both a micro view and a macro view. Sort of that entire world that you need to understand in order to be effective in that world or have it be exciting for them to hear what you have to say.
Let’s talk about snippets! |
| Chui Chui |
So, recently, I have just started to put together something that I thought is super interesting. I thought I will bring the world to everyone in a more interesting way. So, what I have been doing is I curate a series of snippets which contain, like, unique insights about each country or sometimes could be a region. And it could be a specific cultural phenomenon or a collective behavior. So, at the moment, I’m sharing these snippets on my LinkedIn or my website, beyo.global. But if anyone is interested, you can follow #culturesnippets on LinkedIn and you could easily find a series of them, and I’m still trying to put more and more up every week as well.
So why am I doing these snippets? Of course, it’s very interesting and it’s always to let everyone know about, you know, you are not living just in your own countries or in your own world. There are a lot of other things happening around the world that are interesting that you might not think about. But also, it’s my way to show how different and unique each culture could be. And so, it is very imperative for businesses to comprehend their customers on a global scale if they want to serve them well.
So, I give you an example. I was in Kenya and Rwanda, actually, for a project for a health technology company last November. So, what we did is we go into people’s houses in urban and rural areas and we talk to HIV and mental health patients and their families so we can learn about their stories, their challenges and frustrations and their environment and their limitations in terms of technology or health or anything that they are encountering. HIV patients told us they often are being asked to join a support group. And the support group, there are a lot of different ways they talk about their experience, their emotions they are going through and so on.
But one of the things they tell us is that they would normally take turns to give an amount of money to the group, and then they will either give the collected money to one of the people within the group who needs some money more than the others, or they will create a project using that money so everyone can take part. So, that was very insightful for us because we know how the group looks and what are the things that they do during the groups and so on. But what we actually didn’t learn, and we maybe might not be able to learn from the interview, is why such group contributions exist and how it’s embedded into the local community. So, this is where I say earlier about you can get certain elements from an approach, an interview or data or whatever, but you need other things to come in as well.
So, the reason for having this kind of group contributions is you have to look back to their traditions. One of the traditions is called Harambee tradition of community self-help. So, Harambee literally means ‘all pull together’ in Swahili. So, after their independence in 1963, their first prime minister adopted Harambee as a concept so that he can pull the country together by building a new nation where he encouraged communities to work together and individuals to volunteer and to contribute their resources. It could be in forms of cash or labor so that you can have local projects and help for communal group good. So, this spirit or Harambee is why chamas are very common in Kenya.
So, chamas is actually an informal cooperative self-help or, like, micro-saving groups, so that people will pull together their resources and friendship and spirits to help each other. So, the story we heard from our participants when we’re out there, they talk about table banking in their support groups, and all of this is actually rooted in the concept of chamas which was influenced by the Harambee spirit. So, you see what I mean? So, it’s kind of like you didn’t learn this background rationale just from one resource, and such experience and knowledge are the added value that we can add to our clients. And this is very important because all of this deep-rooted insight is where it can give you the holistic views and stories about people, their history and a context, and you can have the deep connections and to connect everything within your peripheral insights. |
| Matthew |
Yeah. What I find exciting about your work is there’s an application for this so broadly in so many ways of engaging with the world. So when I think about large enterprises—like, the CEO wants to know for the money piece of it or the corporation—but, you know, whether you’re an artist or a nonprofit organization or someone who wants to do a startup or an enterprise, there’s pieces of that culturalization that I think are valuable in understanding the world that can be applied so broadly for so many different kinds of enterprises or people who are interested in doing different kinds of things in this smaller and smaller world. |
| Chui Chui |
Yeah, exactly. And like you say, it’s kind of different. It could be the CEO, it could be a product manager, it could be a designer, it could be, you know, that could be anyone. I work with different people. Like, you know, I work with product teams, I work with businesspeople. We work with designers. You know, there are a lot of different…I think this is the whole thing about culturalization: it’s not vertical; it’s very much horizontal. That it will touch upon every single thing you have within your business or organizations. |
| Matthew |
I completely agree. I love that horizontal piece of it. When you think about your work, what do you find most fun about your work? What makes you laugh when you’re on the ground or when you are working with a customer? What do you find delightful and fun about it? |
| Chui Chui |
I think one thing I love, love, love about my job is I am continually learning. I’m not only helping clients to learn about things, but I’m learning constantly as well. And I could go into, like, for example, I was in Japan a year ago for two different clients. Once for Spotify and once for Asana, and one is to do with media and entertainment and then the other one is more serious-related, like work management. So even though I’m there with two clients who are about learning, you know, Japan’s culture and about the context and everything that we talk about, but it was two weeks I was there for different, totally different things.
So, for example, for Asana, because it’s work management tools, we were looking into the hierarchical elements. Making decisions has to be as everyone agrees before you make decisions. Has to be looking into, you know, the politeness in terms of you don’t just assign work to other people, you have to talk to them first. You know, all those elements and cultural-related elements. But all these things that we look into and we try to understand. For Asana, it’s nothing to do with Spotify at all, right? It just doesn’t care if they’re hierarchical or not. You know, there are elements we’re looking into. So, for me, all this… that’s kind of one thing to demonstrate how much it’s nonstop learning and explorations and you’re constantly finding things that you can constantly be excited and about and surprised, you know. |
| Matthew |
If you were going to give people who are listening one piece of advice as they head off into their world and you think about culturalization and the way to think about this, what is the one piece of advice you’d like people to take away from your experience? |
| Chui Chui |
Be curious and inquisitive. Be curious. I think it’s good to always be observing something and then wonder, oh, why do they think about that? Or why do they do that? And kind of understanding people. Yeah, I think it’s kind of like even any friendship or work relationship or whatever: you want to understand, like, the psychology side of it as well as understand people more in-depth. So, asking why and kind of thinking from a very different point of view; be open-minded as well. So, I think, for me, being curious and being open-minded is the key thing. |
| Matthew |
I love that. Well, that gets me started into my day very well, into my curious, curious day. I will enter the rest of my workday with as much curiosity as possible. Thank you. I love that last piece of advice. |
| Chui Chui |
Thank you. |
