Breaking the Limits of Language Barrier in Global Marketing: Crucial for Marketing to the Millennials

Abstract

Globalization of markets compels marketers to pursue international businesses. A few years back the challenge was in justifying the underlying economic rationale for international business. But today, the challenge is in enlarging market shares by promoting the products in different countries, and the segment the business is targeting. Millennials happen to make the major share of global market audience. Since every country has a different culture, international businesses have to determine different strategies, specifically when they are targeting the well informed millennial group who are more digitally oriented and live in the era of icons and emojis. Language plays a big role to neutralize cultural differences in the global context. Using literature review methodology, we discuss the ways language has been treated in international business, the epistemological positions in language barriers and is language translation the only savior in the cultural context of international business for the millennials? The contextualized approach in the paper has the potential not just to enrich the language dimension in international marketing for millennials, but also provide insights for crafting cross-cultural strategy.