Global PR

The growth of technology, international media, global business and global politics has strengthened the role of global public relations. The olympics, football, music, film industry, Coca-cola, and McDonalds are a few examples of how globalisation has come about resulting in the need for PR.
Global PR practioners have to communicate across different time zones, cultures, languages and different communication delivery systems.
In order for successful global PR, communication is grouped into low and high context communication where context has to do with how much one has to know before one can communicate effectively.
High-context means that “most of the information is either in the physical context or initialized in the person, while very little is in the coded, explicit, transmitted part of the message.” (Hall, 1976, p 79). In comparison to the meaning of low-context communication is “the mass of information is vested in the explicit code” (p 70).
China and France are examples of high-context cultures and USA and Germany, low context cultures. China and France place great importance on ambience, decorum, the relative status of the participants in a communication and the manner of massage’s delivery whereas the USA and Germany sometimes ignore these differences.
The Germans for example try to hide information which is sacrificed even within a company or department whereas the French assume that the listener knows everything.
Knowing and being aware of the differences of high- and low-context cultures helps to avoid misunderstandings and creates a better basis for further discussions.