Brands, Mobile and Thinking Globally
Think Global
November 20, 2015
Posted by: Simon Hodgkins, Chief Marketing Officer
The successful growth of a brand requires thinking globally. You may have heard the term that ‘software is eating the world’ and that may be true, however, mobile is taking a fair sized bite. Mobile devices are everywhere with customers accessing and interacting with brands more than ever. Big brands are recognizing the importance of localization, they know how mobile content impacts their customers, and they are investing a growing and increasing focus in this critical area.
As brands look at further global expansion and how to deliver growth in new and existing markets, making sure that your brand resonates in the local country and culture is now fully recognized as being of paramount importance by organizations looking to scale their growth successfully.
Among the continued content explosion, global brands require quality content and language solutions that are effective and cost efficient. Importantly, brands and organizations that scale globally work with an experienced quality language partner who can communicate directly with in-country linguistic professionals to ensure the best outcomes vis-a-vis translation quality and brand representation. Global consumers are experiencing new digital messages all the time from multiple sources and this is changing the way major brands connect to their customers around the world.
Growing and thinking globally when it comes to brand loyalty is more important now than ever. New disruptive market entrants continue to emerge in a widening number of industry sectors; there is also a growing array of customer choice, and end users require a clear and compelling experience at every turn. Thinking globally with local expertise is essential to success in this fast paced communications world. Moving into new markets is always going to be a greatly enhanced and successful experience, and working closely with a partner that has experience in helping brands succeed in this space is critical.
When a company begins to grow internationally, often additional complexities can materialize. Realizing that thinking globally in a complex environment is the first step to getting it right with growth in these new markets. It is important to deliver the right localization investment, and organizations that successfully scale are typically the ones who understand and believe in the importance of quality localization. Ensuring the local customer experience is correct and focusing on areas such as content, delivery experience, payment methods, advertising, products and overall brand experience, all need to be maintained at the highest level. Successful brands adapt to local markets while retaining their core branding, and they can do this while successfully driving synergies across different countries in terms of infrastructure, data and content efficiency. Thinking about the new priority markets, the key messaging, the local distribution and fulfillment experience, all require attention, and so does the localization of key content and visual imagery. Other areas that require attention include marketing support, the timing and accuracy of emails, the correct localization of all communications, digital marketing and many other factors. These are seen as critical, and having the right localization partnership for new international markets is important.
Global commerce is now a fully digitized environment; technology can significantly help to bring the right experience to customers by way of personalization and recommendations.
Organizations can fully leverage technology and data in their localization strategy. These elements can all help to make the customer experience richer and more compelling. Making sure you reach the right audience in a country through using data is important, and technology is again playing a bigger role as offline and online worlds merge with better content and communications. Harnessing a real learning culture with leading technology tools that can help to deliver the best ‘real time’ optimization for your brand can produce much faster success in the global market place.
Working in a highly collaborative relationship with your language partner helps you to scale in a mobile, ultra connected world. Now more than ever, the future is about real connection. Not only does the technology connect people, but the brand must deliver connectivity also.
Mobile is very high in the brand experience relationship. How you interact with a brand in the morning on a smartphone, a laptop or tablet in the afternoon or in the evening, are real ‘moments’ of brand experience, and these brand ‘moments’ are being further segmented, analyzed and translated into important specific local content that reaches the very core of the customer to deliver a true experience for your brand. With customers enjoying ever increasing multidimensional access to large quantities of real time information, the brand experience has to be localized.
When growing a brand or business internationally, it has real world challenges and retaining the brand essence in localized content is vital. Transcreational expertise is very often required to ensure your content is fully aligned. The overall company culture, the brand, the technology elements and the localization strategy are all important factors in successful global communication. As companies focus on expansion into more global and often diverse emerging markets, there can be an increased regulatory requirement along with new competitors and the uncertainty of a new global market investment in its early to mid term stage. Many organizations who are in these growth stages find that they must adopt new business models and new localization practices to continue to meet and exceed their global growth ambitions efficiently. It is not simply about translating words, it is ensuring your brand is successfully executed and scaled effectively in new local markets.
When it comes to technology, its multifaceted and constantly changing nature within a global context can offer significant challenges and opportunities in the sharing and distribution of information. This manifests itself in fast growth organizations now beginning to expand internationally earlier and more rapidly than ever before. Many of the most innovative companies require the delivery of a high quality and cost effective globalized solution to help them grow.
Think Global.