The Icelandic essay

Cultural diversity is possibly the most important aspect when it comes to marketing your product or service abroad. Being oblivious to the culture where you want to sell your product makes you liable to make mistakes such as judging the market incorrectly, your advertisements might be considered rude, or even offensive.  Making these mistakes will ultimately spell failure for you and your company. Make these mistakes on a national level and the society as a whole will suffer, as export wouldn’t be worthwhile.

This is particularly important to Icelandic companies that want to practice business internationally. The country isn’t very culturally diverse, due to its isolation as an island far away from continental Europe. It is its geographical location that makes it virtually unaffected by the emigration of people in Europe, in comparison to most other western European countries.

This is not only a problem found in Iceland, but on a global scale this is a constant battle because almost every country has it´s unique cultural environment and on top of that comes religion, language barriers, and gender roles dilemmas. For example it might be hard to advertise something from a Scandinavian culture in Dubai where everything is different. In situations like that cultural diversity and international teamwork is a key ingredient to a successful marketing and partnership in different countries, if you are going to try and export your product successfully.

Today 77% of the population in Iceland works in the service industry, such as tourism, software engineering, and marine engineering. While roughly 20% work is raw recourses such as agriculture and fishing. These numbers were almost exactly reversed about 100 years ago. i.e. 70% worked in agriculture and fishing and 20% worked in the service industry at that time. This evolution can only be traced back to foreign influence, such as export, import and tourism.