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Breaking Into the “European” Print Market: Understand Geographies and Cultures

Morten Reitoft of INKISH.TV kicks off a new series of editorials offering advice for U.S. companies seeking to enter the European print market. In this first installment, Reitoft stresses that “Europe” is not a single, monolithic market.

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About Morten B. Reitoft

Based in in Denmark, Morten Reitoft is the founder, CEO, and Editor of INKISH.TV. INKISH.TV was founded in 2015 to support knowledge-sharing within the printing industry. Morten has been active in the printing industry for the past 20 years, works with clients across the globe supporting both sales and production operations, and speaks at industry events as part of his mission to foster knowledge-sharing and networking. He can be reached at [email protected]

Discussion

By Shoshana Burgett on May 29, 2018

Morten, you are correct in your observation, but it goes much deeper than that. Americans are very individualistic, focusing on themselves than the collective. This is in stark contrast to some of our European partners who are more willing to work as a partnership. You can see this in the early installs of many print technologies. The first one maybe in the USA to be close to a headquarters or R&D team, but the leaders in new applications are usually coming from Europe. They tend to partner with manufacturers and work collectively with known issues to solve a problem, find viable workarounds and develop new revenue applications. I've spent years studying this and it is proven repeatedly, based on Geert Hofstede's work on the six cultural dynamics.

 

By Morten Reitoft on May 30, 2018

Shoshana, I appreciate your input but can't comment on that in particular since I am so fortunate that the Americans I know seems to on the same page as I am. However, I believe that Americans and Europeans are very different in many ways which initially led me to start writing on this topic.

 

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