“The Nomad” is a fortnightly published series where I talk to expat PR and Comms professionals, then delve into the insights which inform and help other people to live or to do business in an intercultural world. If you or someone you know would be happy to share their perspective, please get in touch! I’d love to hear from you.
As part of my series about how we can learn from intercultural insights to embed them into PR and Comms practices and help create positive social impacts, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Flavio Oliveira, senior communications manager, currently working for EIT Urban Mobility (a body of the European Union).
Flavio Junger de Oliveira holds four University Degrees in Social Communication – 2 BAs (Public Relations and Advertising) and 2 MAs (Intercultural Studies and Global Communications). Flavio has been working with international marketing communications strategies, implementation & evaluation for the last 15 years and counting. Being fluent in five languages (EN, FR, PT, ES, NL), Flavio currently lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, but have lived in several cities in other four countries. He’s passionate about intercultural understanding and frameworks and “finding a common ground” to help people and businesses communicate effectively and communicate for good.
Hi Flavio, thanks so much for joining us! Congratulations on the new role! How are you doing and what’s keeping you busy lately?
My new role as Communication Engagement Officer at EIT Urban Mobility is very exciting as I can work with things I love most – communication, positive change, sustainability, SDGs. EIT Urban Mobility is one of the KICs (Knowledge & Innovation Communities) created by the EIT – European Institute of Innovation and Technology. Our main goal is to put Europe on track for the ambitious 2050’s goals of net-zero carbon-free emissions, and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which is a very stimulating work. My work is focusing on liveable cities and on making cities more pleasant to live through the improvement of urban mobility, by creating new technologies and exploring means of transportation which are kind to the environment but not necessarily new – as for instance, bicycles, which is not new but could really be very impactful if its use is supported by the Government as it is in the Netherlands and in Denmark.
Indeed, the last two months have been very busy because we were preparing our presence at the Dutch Design Week, which took place last week from 16 October to 24 October. It used to be an event very much related to arts but nowadays it’s a very broad event related to many different areas of communication, arts and design.
What also has kept me busy as well is that I have been nominated for Digital PR Guru of 2021 from the World Communication Forum Association in Davos, Switzerland. I was busy with my application which I presented this project. It was a digital and multimedia project that we presented this installation at the Dutch Design Week.
The end of the year is also a special time for me as I’m looking forward to visiting my family in Brazil for Christmas and New Year’s celebrations. Very long answer for the first question!
What brought you to the PR and comms career?
I started to work with events at a very early age – around 12 years old. At school, I was always trying to be the leader or the representative of the class among other students and to talk to people which then brought me to organising events in college. Before joining the university, at the age of 15, I had been organising parties for friends of mine: hiring sound systems, DJs or I would DJ myself. I was selling tickets and making some profit out of it. Then I did business management because business is in almost everything. If you’re a good business administrator, you excel in any area, because the reality of trade from the capitalist production model is very much in line with this course. It also really helps you to have a good view of how business economics and society function in terms of financial and trade exchange. I did a vocational course with a specialised professional to help me identify areas I would like to pursue a Superior Degree. Then they appointed me to business management, public relations and advertising. I could make use of many disciplines where I did two bachelor degrees in five years combined, which was great. I’ll tell you that advertising gave me a very strategic view of how media operates and how to produce media pieces. However, the profession that I chose to have worked in the last 15 years is PR.
I saw many people call it utopian. I don’t think that’s utopian. It’s about managing the communication process in a way that everybody’s understanding everything that’s happening to achieve the famous “mutual understanding”. They say it’s utopian because sometimes you have to change physical aspects of a company, you have to change a process, you have to stop producing a product or stop using some kind of raw material that’s not in line with your values and what you propose because communicating things which are not in line with what you do can really damage your brand. In that sense, I really think that public relations is valid and that the PR professional should be an orchestrator of communication, where everyone should be aware, well-informed and satisfied with their role in the communication process. When any part of the communication process is not fully satisfied, we got to work on that and change it accordingly. That’s why I chose public relations – I like challenges, and I think PR is a challenging profession, many times misunderstood, yet very rewarding.
You worked in a few markets including Brazil, Switzerland and Netherlands. Can you tell us about the PR and Comms/Media landscape in those markets? What should people be mindful of when they want to do PR/Comms practices in those markets?
Interestingly, there are many cultural studies that classify culture, for instance, Hofstede classifies culture per dimension. Culture is one thing that really helps us understand better different markets and how people behave as the culture will directly impact the way, we, humans, communicate.
We are not robots. We have cultural programming, we have a history and a background that will directly influence the way that we communicate – encode and decode communication. Very importantly, for businesses, the way humans decode communication, translate the communication and receive information that we can process in our brains is directly related to our cultural backgrounds, with the way that we see ourselves within the environment we are we are inserted.
For instance, whenever you do business in Brazil, it’s important to understand that Brazil is a collective culture. Generally, of course, it’s a stereotype and the national culture is different from the regional culture as wisely pointed by Professor Geert Hofstede in one of our many conversations when I was a student in the Netherlands, as he was the Patron of my Master’s in Intercultural Communication. For example, Leeds is quite different from London or Bournemouth in the very south – but in general, there’s this umbrella culture which is the national British culture and it’s very strong. We have been programmed in many different aspects of life from looking at the national flag and recognising it as a symbol of our country to much deeper aspects, as the intrinsic values and traditions of a specific culture.
As Hofstede indicates, this cultural programming happens mostly from zero to six years old, all of us get this programming. We can deprogram and reprogram our brains at a later stage in life, for instance when we move abroad, we go through a process of acculturation, but that is surely not an easy process and most surely there will be a “cultural shock” before being able to reprogram your brains.
We should look into the cultural differences to find where you have similarities you can work much easier because you’re going to be natural and where you don’t have similarities, you have to establish a common ground. Especially if you are a company, you are the one that makes amends and says “I’m going to change, I’m going to be more flexible to accommodate your needs (from the client). Communication can vary brutally from one country to another. As I said, it’s always important to understand there are differences but no better or worse. When you do business in a different country, consider the cultural factors, especially where they differ and where they are similar. Only then could you create messages that resonate with both cultures of your organisation and of the country you want to operate.
As we discussed before, you mentioned that you had a theory that you’d written in your MA thesis at Leeds Beckett which proposes a specific line of study to be called Intercultural Public Relations. Can you elaborate on this, please? How have the intercultural insights helped you pivot your career?
It helped me a lot. When I arrived in the Netherlands, I didn’t know many people – I had no connections, no family there and I came to study with zero networks. I was always being very Brazilian and trying to make friends, you know, talking and talking but I didn’t feel the same reaction from people, as I used to presume when I talked to people, people would talk back to me. In Brazil, it’s very unlikely they say no as from our culture, we always say yes. I didn’t realise it was a very different culture. Dutch people are very direct and can easily say “no” if that is the case. People don’t make friends that quick; people don’t really talk to each other if they don’t know each other. That was a big difference from my culture which quickly led me to a considerable “cultural shock”. I went to the Netherlands to do my master’s degree in Intercultural Communications and in the first few days of study, I was reading and thinking “Wow, this is happening to me”; that’s why I’m so passionate about intercultural frameworks because they really help you to understand where you are and minimise the shocks you might get from being immersed in a culture different from your native culture.
Most importantly, and that’s why I keep saying, we need to use these insights in business communication to be more effective, to go further and to engage in a better way with our peers from different cultures. There is a phrase from Hofstede that I used in the opening of my Master’s thesis: “Culture is more often a source of conflict rather than synergy” which I absolutely agree with. However, I complete the phrase with “Whenever there is synergy between people from different cultures, there is cultural synergy”. I believe cultural synergy is something extremely powerful to increase creativity and productivity in an organisation. Whenever we consider different cultural factors to connect, to understand we are different and try to find common ground, amazing things happen. And I have seen these in my daily work life.
In that sense, I wrote a blog-post years ago about the creation of a new area of studies within PR which should be called Intercultural Public Relations. It would apply theories from PR combined with Cultural Frameworks from Cultural Studies. I strongly believe this is much needed in the current times, with a globalised & connected world. We went global and interconnected very quickly, but we still miss the understanding among different cultures, to create synergies from the differences, instead of shocks. More information on this theory can be found at http://globalpublicrelations.blogspot.com/2014/05/ipr-public-relations-for-todays.html.
The future is intercultural. The speed at which the pandemic spread across the globe proved the world is more closely connected than perhaps we fully realised. What are the challenges we are facing as PR and comms practitioners, especially in the post-pandemic with a unified digital world?
That’s a great question! I agree with you the future is intercultural. I’ll add that the future is now — we have reached the future. We are living in a globalised society; we are more interconnected than ever. The pandemic indeed has accelerated an ongoing process that was going on for years that never allowed the employees to work from home and now we are having full-time employees working from home – Things have changed quickly. What I think is a big challenge for us is that we are really connected but we are very disconnected from each other. I really think — and this is a very strong personal positioning as a professional and as a human being — I’m living in a bubble. The social inequality in the Netherlands is much smaller than in many countries, especially in Brazil where I grew up. However, there is social inequality. Whenever there is social inequality, small or big, even if we eradicate social inequality from Europe or the UK but we still have social inequality in South Africa, Brazil or Mexico, it’s not going to work for us to be a globally connected society.
To be resilient for the future, we need systemic change in order to survive, to be able to be here in 50 years, I really think we have to care more about each other. It might sound cliche, but I don’t think so. We as specialised professionals have the luck to have had the education, and the choice as well, we have to keep an open mind, and we have to include people. It is about including everyone no matter nationality, colour, social origin, sexual orientation, or whatever is the choice that you make in life. We need to be diverse. We have to eradicate, together with poverty and starvation, prejudice.
You mentioned the systemic change, diversity and inclusion. You also mentioned your interests in cross-cultural engagement and corporate diplomacy which directly aligns with ESG, Sustainability, Equity and Diversity. Can you take us through this idea please and if I may, can you please give an example of how this intersectionality works?
From a corporate side, I like to use the term “corporate diplomacy”. It has been taught in books of Philip Kotler or many years, and Peter Drucker who was a genius. We have to work with the communities and a marketing strategy to sell more work with the communities. If they are happy, it’s a natural flow that your brand is going to be elevated which means more business for your company. What I mean by corporate diplomacy is that we need to have a genuine interest in doing what matters and what’s needed. That’s why I really like when you mentioned the term equity. Salaries and compensations should be comparable and not the same. If you have a colleague that has special needs, there is a lot of expenses depending on their special needs, which is much more expensive than just paying for your rent, your food and your travel and your clothes. There should be a genuine interest in doing the right thing and having equitable salaries. If a mother has two kids and is a single mother, she will need more money than I do being single with no kids. We need a human approach to help people get their work, and help people retain their work. We are a global society, we have global resources, we have organisations like the United Nations that work for humankind, then we need to stop talking and start working together.
The most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is said to be a “code red for humanity”. We’re observing changes in the Earth’s climate in every region and across the whole climate system. There’s also the recent research from the PRCA stating that “71% of comms professionals agree they are advising on the climate crisis more frequently than five years ago”. Some are having a genuine interest but some are just jumping on the bandwagon. How can we address this problem? What is our role in advising our clients to take meaningful actions on climate issues in particular and on ESG challenges in general?
Oh, that’s a really great question. The discussion about climate change was 30 years ago in Kyoto; we don’t have much time to discuss any more! We have to do; we have to act. We are risking the extinction of the corals in the next 10 years. This has happened really quick and we already left 90% of all coral reefs in the world. They have gone bleached. There is no technology to bring them back to life. We know where we are going. Climate change is something that more communication professionals have been asked to advise. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of misinformation. I think what can really help us is to get science on our side. If a company wants to make a campaign about the life of oceans and how they can be affected by climate change, go to the scientific sources. Whenever you want to use numbers, use the UN numbers because at least they represent almost the whole world. If you are in doubt, you can always connect with organisations like Greenpeace or WWF and they can provide more accurate information. Normally they would love to talk to corporations on how to do campaigns to make people aware of the grave danger that we are, like Extinction Rebellion says, risking extinction of the human race. This is a very important topic for us.
I’ve never been to Netherlands or Brazil. If you were my tour guide for one day, where would you introduce me to?
That is not an easy question to answer. Both countries have their special magic in many different ways. But let me try! The Netherlands become very colourful in Spring when millions of tulips pop up around the country, especially in the Keukenhof (https://keukenhof.nl/en/) where there is the largest exhibition of live tulips in the world, we are talking about millions of bulbs in a beautiful setting. I would strongly recommend you to try to visit Holland between 24th March and 15th May 2022, when the park will be opened again for public visits. Besides, this amazing flower exhibition – one of the largest on the planet – there are many other highlights to the Netherlands. As physical events are gradually returning, Amsterdam always hosts hundreds of interesting events per year, from winter to winter, there is something cool to do in the city.
For Brazil, I would surely recommend you start by visiting my beloved Northeast region, where the tropical beaches are located, situated within the line of Equator, the weather is simply amazing, ranging between 21 degrees to 35 degrees all year long, with average temperatures around 25 C degrees. White sand beaches, loads of coconut trees and a special attention to the food – really tasty, healthy, natural food. Of all kinds you can imagine, but when in Northeast, I recommend seafruits, fresh fish, exotic fruits and vegetables, and of course “cuzcuz, tapioca and dried sun meat”, all of this, very strong powerful tasty food. I miss Brazilian food every day when I am not there, for me, surely the best gastronomy in the world is found in Brazil, so varied, fresh and tasty. I hope you go visit Brazil and the Netherlands soon, so I can take you on a tour myself!! Good luck and thank you for the opportunity to share some ideas with you!! 😊
