A week in the Munich area, meeting up with analysts and AR professionals there, shows how the business culture in Europe’s German-speaking region poses some special challenges to both analysts and to AR professionals. Not the least of these is the need to communicate with the English, who dominate the region’s analyst community.
Germany’s strong base of mid-sized firms means that approaches are less Anglicised than elsewhere, and that cross-cultural frictions appear between German buyers and culturally American analyst firms. This partly because Anglo-Saxon analysts don’t address either German buyers’ information needs or their skeptical view towards offshore research. In turn, this produces a vibrant market for custom consulting projects.
All of this means that AR managers need to show the difference between analyst influence within the region and how it plays out elsewhere; it posed analysts with a similar challenge, to adapt their research to the greatly differing information needs of their buyers.
