West Meets East: Cross-cultural Branding — Yvonne Cao
Channel: TypeCon
Date: 2019-03-12

Recorded during TypeCon2018: Xx in Portland, Oregon

When an American brand attempts to expand its market overseas, it needs to translate the brand into the local visual language in order for it to be understood by the new market. Global Branding project is an interdisciplinary design assignment that examines sources, media delivery systems and impact of globally conveyed information in different cultural contexts. In this project, we teamed Graphic Design students with Strategic Communication graduate students to develop a multimedia design campaign for an American brand that wants to enter the Asian market. This collaboration put emphasis on how global brands are communicated and positioned to target Asian audiences—through marketing communications, including advertising, public relations, and sales promotions, which was a relatively foreign concept for most of our traditional design students. This talk explains how the assignment engages students in cultural research and analysis, and how they worked on overall marketing strategy and visual brand translation, and websites, social media promotional pieces and more for the business plans.

Teaching students to approach problems by using collaborative and interpersonal skills provides them with durable assets to better understand international audiences, colleagues, and perspectives. The proliferation and integration of first-hand cross-cultural experiences into design curricula can result in innovation and knowledge sharing, indicating synergistic properties in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.