Think global, act local!? : Hur ett svenskt företag går till väga för att skapa ett enhetligt budskap i olika kulturer

Sammanfattning: An uncountable number of companies are present in foreign markets as a result of what we commonly choose to call globalization. This is especially true for Swedish companies traditionally operating on small markets. A company that is about to establish on a new market is faced not only with possibilities but also with challenges and risks. Researchers have found that companies that establish on foreign markets will have to deal with competitors on the national as well as on the global market, and therefore need consider how they globalize their brands. In addition to this, a brand can only reach international success if its message is coherent within and across every single market. At the same time an understanding of the local culture and adaption to it is another success factor. The objective of the study is to explore and analyze how a Swedish company communicates and adapts its brand through TV-commercials, on the national market on the one hand and globally on the other, so as to be able to reach a common message. The use of qualitative methods such as an interview with Martin Sundberg, Media Manager at TELE2, has helped the authors to understand the company’s key-identity and has made a further study of the company’s messages in the TV-commercials used in Sweden, Russia and Latvia. In Sweden TELE2 has chosen to communicate its message by using the sheep Frank, a character who is searching for an environment which he can relate to  and ends up feeling at home in a Telecom company. An elegant office environment is presented where colours such as beige, black and white dominate the images, and the company hopes to be considered as professional, stable, reliable and as offering high quality. In Russia the message is communicated through a mafia-theme, where the environment is masculine and criminal. The company’s key-identity is communicated through a rough environment where gangsters and mafia-bosses operate, which indicates that it is cool not to pay too much. And finally, in Latvia, superheroes with explicit female and male roles are used in the commercials. The buildings and the interior decoration is simple and its standard is average. The study has been able to show that TELE2 has a clear tendency towards adapting their messages locally by using different campaigns and taglines.  The company uses cultural norms and values to communicate its message in a fun way. TELE2’s understanding of the Russian market is, for instance, that describing something out loud as inexpensive may sound inelegant. That is why TELE2 turns the problem into a virtue with "Too cool to pay".