Why branding across cultures starts with anthropology, not with a camera

By Michael Bittner, Founder and Creative Director, Horus Horizon Productions

When people ask me what I do, the short answer is that I make films and take photographs. The longer answer usually surprises them. Before I pick up a camera for a client, I spend most of my time doing what I was trained to do as an anthropologist: trying to understand what something means, and to whom.

I learned to look at the world this way over seven years with Harley-Davidson. I researched its riders, its dealerships and its rituals as the fieldwork for my bachelor’s and master’s theses in cultural anthropology and transnational communication. Put simply, transnational communication is the study of how meaning travels from one culture to another, and what happens to it on the way.

People sometimes expect me to say that Harley’s success has nothing to do with motorcycles. I don’t believe that. They build great motorcycles. The idea that they don’t goes back to business decisions in the 1970s that the brand is still paying for today. But the motorcycle alone doesn’t explain why someone tattoos the logo on their arm, or builds weekends, friendships and sometimes a whole identity around it. For me there is no such thing as the best brand. There are brands that activate people, and brands that don’t. If I had to put seven years of research into one sentence, it would be this: people don’t buy the better product. They buy the story they want to belong to.

That idea sits at the center of everything I do now. It matters even more when a business sells across borders, because what you are really exporting is a set of signals, and signals don’t translate themselves the way words do.

More than a video

Here in Cyprus, branding is still mostly bought as a production: a video, a photo shoot, maybe a package of reels, with a brief about locations and delivery dates. I understand why. It’s tangible and easy to compare. But in my experience the real work is so much more than recording a video or taking some pictures.

Before anything gets filmed, somebody has to sit down with the uncomfortable questions. Who is this business actually for? What does that audience already believe, and what do they read as trustworthy, as premium or as cheap? What is the company communicating without realizing it, and which story does it have that nobody has told yet?

I call my way of answering them Fieldwork. I spend time in the client’s world first, dig for the story that is really there, decide together with them what the audience should get to see, and only then do we produce the films and photographs. The films are the proof of that understanding. Without the understanding, they’re just nice footage.

Every market reads differently

Cyprus sells to the whole world. A villa in Limassol is marketed to buyers in London, Tel Aviv, Beirut, Dubai and Athens, and a hotel here competes for guests from a dozen countries. Most businesses deal with that by translating the website into English, Russian, Hebrew or Arabic, and they stop there.

The words are actually the easy part. Nobody translates the signals underneath them. In some cultures you show wealth openly, while in others showing it suggests you haven’t had it for very long. A minimalist room can read as luxury to one buyer and as cold to another, and a gated entrance can feel safe to one person and isolating to the next. None of these readings are wrong; they’re local.

I like to think of status as a set of dialects rather than one language, and the buyers with the most money tend to be the most fluent in them. They notice within a second whether a signal has been earned or copied.

A London founder

This summer I worked with the founder of a London firm that prepares property plans for legal transactions: measurements, boundaries, the documents a solicitor needs before a lease or a sale can go through. Honestly, on paper it’s the least cinematic product anyone has ever asked me to film.

The firm was very good at what it did and had years of experience behind it, but everything it communicated described what it produced and nothing explained why that mattered. The problem wasn’t competence, it was translation.

Once we had done the fieldwork, the whole brief changed. His clients weren’t really buying a drawing; they were buying certainty, the confidence that the plan would never be the reason a deal got stuck. We also realized that the most important audience wasn’t the property owner at all but the lawyer, because when a solicitor recommends a plan provider, the client rarely questions it.

Then there was the question of tone. Most of my work in Cyprus sells desire: light, atmosphere, a lifestyle people want. This project sold relief, and that changed the signals completely. We kept him calm and exact on camera, more like a professional explaining something he believes than a salesman smiling into the lens. For the captions we used one simple test: would he say this sentence to a solicitor over a coffee? “The file went out before the deadline” works, “reliable, timely service” doesn’t, because London professionals tend to ignore adjectives and trust details.

And while my own visibility in Cyprus grew mostly on Instagram through local collaborations, his decision-makers are lawyers, and lawyers are on LinkedIn, so that’s where his authority content went. Same method I use here, different accent.

What we shot, and what we left out

In one and a half days in London we produced 49 photographs, around 20 to 25 reels, a short image film, a homepage video and a trailer for the company. Every photo was then checked against a simple question: does it prove something?

The strongest picture shows him leaning on a brick balcony rail in a London housing block with a clipboard and a laser measure. It tells a lawyer the one thing they need to know, that this man actually goes on site. The most beautiful picture of the shoot was a quiet pond in a London park, two geese and a perfect reflection. We didn’t use it, because it said nothing about his business.

In Cyprus, beauty is often what we’re selling. In that market, a beautiful image that proves nothing is decoration, and knowing the difference has a lot more to do with reading people than with handling a camera.

The change that matters most

He was already getting more leads during the two months of onboarding, before we even went to London. But if you asked me what changed most, I wouldn’t say the leads. I’d say the mindset.

Working with a founder like this isn’t only operational. We worked deeply on his language, on his posture, on the way he walks into a room, and on how he understands himself as the founder and CEO of his company and what he stands for. Everyone presents some version of themselves in public, and many founders present a defensive one without noticing. The camera picks that up immediately. When the way someone understands himself changes, the way he comes across changes too, and no edit can fake that.

I basically help him grow internally, and that’s what allows the company to grow externally.

Price is part of the story

One more thing I see a lot in Cyprus: people treat price as a number, but clients read it as a signal like everything else. A high price with no story behind it comes across as arrogant, while the same price with a clear and true story comes across as confident. The businesses that can charge what they’re worth, here and abroad, aren’t the ones with the best equipment or the biggest ad budget but the ones whose story makes the price feel right.

Those are the clients I work with: founders and companies who compete on value rather than on being the cheapest. Developers, agencies, hotels and brands who don’t need more content so much as an identity people can read in any language.

Five questions to ask before you sell abroad

1. Who carries trust in that market? Every market has people whose recommendation ends the discussion about price, and you want to know who they are before you write any marketing.
2. What do they consider premium? Not what you think is premium, but what they think, and where they draw the line between tasteful and trying too hard.
3. What is your business saying without you noticing? Your website, your photos and your profile as a founder all send signals, and some of them probably contradict what you mean to say.
4. Can people see the founder? Across borders, people buy from people before they buy from companies, and a founder who can be seen and heard before the first meeting closes more distance than any brochure.
5. Can you explain your price in one sentence? If you can’t, your client won’t be able to either.

Fieldwork in, Emotion Pictures out

When we talk about international business we usually talk about tax, regulation and market entry, and all of that is important. But the moment someone abroad decides whether to trust you comes much earlier, when they first see you, hear you and decide whether your story is true.

Cyprus has always thrived on people who understand more than one culture, and I think that’s an advantage we don’t use enough. A good story can travel almost anywhere. It just has to learn the accent of the place where it lands.

About the author

Michael Bittner is the founder and creative director of Horus Horizon Productions, based in Cyprus and working internationally. A visual anthropologist who makes films, he spent seven years researching Harley-Davidson culture for his studies in cultural anthropology and transnational communication. Today he helps founders and companies understand who they are, how the market reads them, and how to show it on film. Trained in anthropology. Working in film. horushorizon.com · contact@horushorizon.com

Author: Din Kumar