Corporate Communication Challenges in India

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COMMUNICATION CHALLENGES AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Conducting a corporate communications initiative in India can be an overwhelming experience with it’s religious, cultural and lingual diversity. The critical factors to take into account when conducting a corporate communications initiative in India are the language challenges, political considerations, different ethical systems and the level of corruption, different cultural norms, religious differences, attitudes towards women, mass media challenges and limited information technology structure. Although India is a developing country, it has over 5,000 media channels that are thriving, the factors of ‘early stage’ media and narrow media channels does not affect the corporate communications planning for this country.
LANGUAGE CHALLENGES
India’s Language
India has a population of over 1.2 billion people and is the world’s second-most populated country. It is home to several languages, but does not have a national language. Depending on region Instead, India has official languages that they function with on a daily basis.
English has a subsidiary official language status in India, whereby it is the most important language for national, political and commercial communication, as well as in education. With more than 400 million speakers, Hindi is also one of the most widely spoken language and a primary tongue for most of India.
In addition to these two languages, to date, India has 22 official languages in total. In no particular order, they are: Assamese, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Sanskrit, Bodo, Dogri, Konkani, Maithili, Manipuri, Nepali, and Santhali. In India, one’s national identity is not as impo...

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...ical party or agenda. Parties come and go and you need to able to work with different parties on a constant basis.
7. Give yourself a lot of time before your event, and when you arrive. This will allow you to understand the on-ground situation better and also handle any unexpected political or a government situation. E.g some time items are still stuck at customs and you need to get in touch with the right official to handle the situation or you do have the right permit to have an outdoor event. This will require some time to get it settled.
8. Although India is democratic and you will not be imprisoned for criticizing the government, it is advisable not to criticize the government in public.
9. Always have a Plan B. If for some reason, there is political situation on the same day of your event or launch, you plan would be to postpone the launch to a later date.

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