Why You Need a Foreign Language & How to Learn One: Online Version
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CHAPTER 6
LANGUAGES AND THE BUSINESS WORLD
THE BRITISH CEO WHO SPOKE TO KOREAN CONSUMERS---IN KOREAN
In November 2003, struggling Korean automaker GM Daewoo launched a series of television commercials aimed at boosting its sales in Korea. Among other challenges, the company was fighting a public perception problem. Its two main competitors in the Korean market, Hyundai Motor and Kia Motors, were homegrown Korean firms. GM Daewoo, on the other hand, was owned mostly by U.S. automaker General Motors. Polls revealed that the average Korean consumer viewed the company as an outsider with a questionable commitment to the Korean market. The company needed a publicity campaign to establish itself as a “real” Korean firm.
Nick Reilly, the company’s British-born CEO, took the GM Daewoo message to the Korean public. His appearance in Korean television commercials made national news in Korea, and reverberated throughout the global automotive industry. He was, of course, not the first automotive CEO to appear on TV. Jacques Nasser, Lee Iacocca, and several members of the Ford clan have also stepped down from the CEO’s pedestal to directly pitch their company’s wares to consumers.
Nick Reilly’s television appearances made news because the CEO addressed viewers in Korean. Using their own language, Reilly expressed the company’s commitment to Korea, and its desire to be accepted as a truly “Korean” automaker.
Japanese executives from Toyota and Honda regularly address American audiences in English (and Mexican audiences Spanish, etc.) –but this doesn’t make the news. Korean is an especially challenging language; but the reporters who showered so much attention on Reilly’s publicity campaign did not focus on the relative difficulty of the Korean language. The commercials made the news because a high-ranking manager from the English-speaking world was displaying real competency in a foreign language. The Korean-language commercials would likely have been deemed less newsworthy if the GM Daewoo CEO would have been a German or a Japanese national.
Nick Reilly’s Korean television commercials prove that a native English-speaker need not be a professional linguist in order to competently handle a foreign language. Moreover, there is clear evidence that the corporate world values foreign language skills. (Otherwise, U.S. multinationals would not hire so many of the foreign-born educated elite.) Therefore, the next logical question is: Why don’t more American businesspersons learn a foreign language?
Copyright 2005 Beechmont Crest Publishing
