Intercultural communication in transnational work

Just take a minute to reflect: What do you associate with WWF, Greenpeace or UNICEF? What kind of emotions come up when you hear the names of these associations? Can you remember their logo? Do you associate particular tag lines, symbols or colours?

All the elements you may have associated with these organisations are part of their image. In the following we will discuss some helpful items for the work on the image of your organisation.

According to some the organisational image is

“The perception people have of your business when they hear your company name. A business’s image is composed of an infinite variety of facts, events, personal histories, advertising and goals that work together to make an impression on the public.” https://www.entrepreneur.com/encyclopedia/image

The image, in other words, is what others associate with a company’s name. Companies actively work on their image in order to model it according to their vision to be more successful by better meeting the expectations of the target group.

In many cases it seems probably more natural to think of an organisational image referred to a company and its marketing strategies (Missoni, 2014, 368f.). But also non-profit organisations have an “image”. Randomly asked people would probably easily be able to answer the question “What do you associate with WWF, Greenpeace or UNICEF?” thus giving an idea of what they intuitively think of these well-known non-profit organisations.

One of the most well known public images is that of the “International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies”, which is the umbrella organisation of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent Societies. The colours red and white are the same for all organisations, but the symbols differ according to the cultural background of the localised organisations. Colours and symbols together have a high recognition value.

https://www.drk.de/en/the-grc/partners-of-the-grc/the-international-red-cross/