Dr. Chui Chui Tan, cultural strategist and author, shares her journey helping businesses navigate cultural nuances for global growth. With over 16 years of experience in user experience internationally, she has orchestrated successful market launches for companies like Spotify, Netflix, and Bumble across 50 countries. Her approach goes beyond user research and experience to incorporate a holistic understanding of market ecosystems, helping businesses avoid cultural stereotyping while making informed strategic decisions.
Born in Malaysia to Chinese parents, Chui Chui moved to the UK over 20 years ago. Her unique background and global experience inform her approach to cultural strategy. Beginning with mechanical engineering and an unexpected transition through music technology to human-computer interaction, she eventually specialized in international research after conducting user interviews in Beijing for a hotel client.
Over time, her work evolved from pure user experience research to a more holistic approach that considers history, infrastructure, politics, and economic factors when helping businesses enter new markets.
- You can listen here or wherever you get your podcasts: https://www.howthisworks.show/034-dr-chui-chui-tan
- Or watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Q9mC2bykxuo
Key points from the conversation:
- Four-bucket methodology - Chui Chui shares her framework for organizing market knowledge into known facts, strong hypotheses, weak hypotheses, and unknowns when entering new markets. This approach helps align teams and identify critical knowledge gaps.
- Context-specific cultural adaptation - She explains how cultural manifestations differ depending on product context, using her contrasting work with Asana and Spotify in Japan to illustrate how the same users interact differently with different products based on cultural values.
- Cultural frameworks in practice - Chui Chui discusses the strengths and limitations of popular frameworks like Erin Meyer's "Culture Map" and Hofstede's cultural dimensions, emphasizing the importance of practical application over theoretical models.
- Future of AI in cultural strategy - Drawing from her experiments with ChatGPT, Baidu's Ernie, and Inception's Jais (Arabic) to analyze cultural insights, she predicts AI will complement but not replace human understanding of cultural nuances.
- Cross-cultural identity - Reflecting on her own bicultural experience, Chui Chui discusses how individuals navigate multiple cultural identities, noting she can "be more British in certain aspects of my life, and then when it comes to certain things, I'm quite Malaysian or quite Asian."
- Personal philosophy - "Care less about things that are not as important" – Chui Chui's evolving perspective on focusing energy on what truly matters, both personally and professionally.
Chui Chui also shares her fascination with understanding the origins of cultural differences, currently exploring this through reading "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari among others.
You can find Chui Chui at:
- Website: beyo.global
- LinkedIn: Chui Chui Tan
- YouTube: @chuichuitan
The audio and video for this episode has been edited by Gideon Kroutil.
Special Guest: Dr. Chui Chui Tan.
Links:
- "Research for Global Growth: Strategies and Guidance for Cross-Cultural Insights" & "International User Research" by Chui Chui Tan
- Chui Chui Tan on Erin Meyer's 'Culture Map' and other culture frameworks
- The Culture Map by Erin Meyer
- Erin Meyer's tools, including the Country Mapping Tool
- Geert Hofstede's six (6) dimension model of national culture
- Trompenaars's model of national culture differences
- Chui Chui Tan on hospital waiting rooms and business strategy
- ChatGPT
- Baidu's Ernie
- Jais — Jais is an open-source large language model developed in the United Arab Emirates and launched in August 2023. It was trained on both English- and Arabic-language data. Jais is named after Jebel Jais, the highest mountain in the United Arab Emirates.
- Why Gemini, Google’s AI tool, was slammed for showing images of people of color
- DeepSeek
- Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
- Culinary Class Wars on Netflix
- Taiko drumming