Your company is ready to take its new product to an international market. The product has sold well in Canada, there is a need for the product or service in the new market and the economy is thriving. All of the indicators are positive so you launch the same marketing campaign that spurred the product growth in Canada and find your early sales to be much slower than anticipated. Why? There are many potential reasons for this, but if past history is any indication, one of the major failings of companies expanding to emerging international markets is how they market the product, no matter how good it is.

You can't help but smile at the story of Chevrolet marketing their brand new Nova in Latin America and then not grasping why it didn't sell. The problem lay in the language. "No va" in Spanish means "doesn't go", which is exactly what happened to the sales figures.

To be fair to Chevrolet they were not alone in their international marketing blunder. Gerber baby food, Coke, Pepsi, Perdue Poultry and Gillette have all taken their turn as the butt of international marketing jokes

With modern technology shrinking our world, international borders are becoming less of a barrier. The temptation is to believe that this will accentuate our cultural similarities, when in fact the opposite has been found to be true. As companies become more global, many countries (including in some ways Canada) have become more protective of their culture. This increased sense of patriotism makes successful entry by foreign consumer products more difficult and the need for subtle marketing adaptations more important

In Thomas Friedman's best-selling book, "The Lexus and the Olive Tree", the author quotes a political theorist's observation on the phenomena of product globalization. He said: "There are two ways to make a person feel homeless - one is to destroy his home and the other is to make his home look and feel like everybody else's home."

The best way to avoid creating that feeling of homelessness is to understand the culture you are selling to and make consumers think that your product is unique to their needs. Before you can understand marketing to new cultures, you must first understand what culture is. Culture can be defined as a set of values and beliefs that are learned, shared and passed on to give us our identity.

This is the most obvious of concerns. When you decide to translate your company slogan or the name of the product, ensure that there are no slang translations, which can lead to embarrassment. Another notable and humourous example of this was the Chinese translation of Pepsi's "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation" slogan, which translated to "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave." This may have been good for sales, but I don't think Pepsi could actually do that.

Generally North Americans and most Europeans are very low context people, meaning they verbally state what they are thinking, with very little need for non-verbal cues or nuances. The opposite can be said of Asians and Latin Americans, who use body language, status, relationships, the use of silence and many other factors to communicate meaning. In a low context culture, like ours, it is expected that advertising be done directly, with information being conveyed in a straightforward manner. People from high context cultures would find this type of advertising to be pushy and aggressive, and expect to see ads with information being transmitted through differences in tone, music, scenery and other non-verbal cues.

In different cultures these three things have very different meanings. Know what the colour of mourning is and don't advertise cars in that colour. Learn what number is unlucky and avoid packaging items in those units. Understand which symbols do not transfer across cultures, and then do not use them. The thumbs up sign may be a pleasant on in the United States, but Australians will interpret it very differently.

Cultures vary considerably in what they consider to be traditional values. For example, in Germany they have a tradition of engineering excellence, in England they loath hyperbole and in China they have a tradition of valuing old, wise and consistent over new, aggressive and improved. These traditions are only examples of those that must be known and catered to for successful marketing.

The central principal of marketing across cultures is no different from marketing within a single culture - know your market! The challenge is that it is easier to know about the culture you live in than one that you are just visiting.