English as a strategic asset
If you’re marketing to English-speaking markets, it pays to remember that you will likely be up against some of the world’s best communicators: the sales and marketing executives recruited by native-English speaking countries. These days, a standard job description for American or British sales and marketing people almost always requests things like:
Superior verbal and written communication skills
- Theikos (USA)
Excellent verbal and written communication skills with the ability of attention to detail
- (Sprint/Nextel)
Excellent oral, written and presentation skills…
- A.M. Nielsen
Strong oral and written communication skills…
- Merck & Co. Inc.
Professional-level written and verbal communication skills…
- New-edge Networks, Inc.
Since verbal communication is the backbone of almost any persuasive task, Danish companies have their work cut out for them in oral presentations, written marketing materials and so on. Their native-English speaking counterparts simply have a natural advantage when it comes to speaking or writing persuasively.
As part of the effort to lift Danish competitiveness in the international arena, I suggest that Danish companies view the English language skills of their marketing and sales people as a competitive element that needs to be developed and improved in the same way as any other strategic asset.
A strategic asset is any asset that has strong significance for an organization’s competitive positioning, whether it be a production, financial or marketing resource. The organization should have a plan for maintaining and further developing each of its strategic assets to make sure that it performs strongly in a competitive marketplace.
August 15th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
We see many Danish companies already treating English as a strategic asset. For example, when a company such as Hempel takes the time and resources to develop from scratch a comprehensive English-language style guide, it means the appropriate use of English in internal and external communications is vital to business performance.
The style guide is an element within Hempel’s communications strategy and the aim is for it to be promoted and used widely by employees around the world.
Other Danish companies we know, such as LEGO, realize that their English skills are so important, that they offer staff specialist English communications training. They simply don’t want to be put in the situation where staff can’t do their jobs properly because they don’t have the right sort of English skills.
So we see this positive trend in some of Denmark’s international success stories. But what about so many other companies that have the potential, but are not quite there yet? You only have to visit a few websites or see a few poorly executed international campaigns to realize that there is a huge gap between those who invest the resources and those who don’t.