Wrestling with culture of exporting brings commendations

21.11.06

Two innovative exporters have been recognised with Encouragement Awards in the 2006 National Multicultural Marketing Awards which were announced at a dinner in Sydney tonight hosted by the NSW Premier, Morris Iemma.

The Awards have been run by the Community Relations Commission For a multicultural NSW since 1979 to highlight innovation in dealing with cultural diversity.

One was a plan to take a team of Australian professional wrestlers to China where such entertainment has not been seen for at least forty years. The company called Make-Believe Pty Ltd. planned to take Australian wrestlers to China and elsewhere in, what they called, an exciting mix of sport and entertainment with elements of action, drama and humour. The company was using its close cultural and linguistic links with China to negotiate this unusual deal.

“We aim to not only revive an Australian style of wrestling that has been in decline for decades but we seek to promote Australia , its cultural diversity and its multiculturalism. We hope to create the same excitement as that created by the 1971 so-called Ping Pong diplomacy, which was the breakthrough eventually leading to the establishment of diplomatic relations between Australia and China in 1972.”

Make Believe has big plans to revitalise the Australian wrestling industry using a few big name stars of and take it to “over a billion affluent, curious ad thrill-seeking Chinese”.

The Chair of the Commission, Stepan Kerkyasharian , said “Unfortunately this intriguing project has not yet come to fruition. So we cannot make a full award as yet. We look forward to judging the results of this idea once it is executed”.

Another exporter highly commended is a pharmaceutical company called Ikulu which has begun to perfect “the art of selling refrigerators to Eskimos” by selling back to Asian countries health products we normally import from them. Ikulu claims that by simply employing correctly the tools for multicultural marketing they have increased its sales by 95%.

They clam this was achieved by recruiting bilingual staff with a knowledge of the target markets. These staff-members were used not only in developing the markets but in international negotiations, interpreting, cross cultural (and religious) awareness training and, in the case of recent migrants, made good use of their existing business networks in their former home countries.

The bi-lingual staff were used throughout the process of developing the products, designing labels and product info rmation and the marketing strategy itself.

“This was also a very interesting project well in line with the principles of multicultural marketing or productive diversity. However the judges felt that neither entry was sufficiently well developed to warrant a full Export Award. Yet their ideas are well worth recognising and I commend their approach to any other company which has yet to see the markets abroad available to them if they simply employ the skills of our talented workforce”, Mr Kerkyasharian said.