I recently spoke to a graduate business school management class on globalization issues. As always, I asked two questions: 1) Why do most companies want to globalize their operations? and 2) What’s the best way to reach global markets? The knee-jerk response to the “why” question was – and always is – money. The immediate answer to the second question was the Web. So the obvious syllogism to making more money is to go global on the Web.
But it’s never that easy to get buyers in other countries to click through to your Website. They’re just as able to click away to a competitor.
So let’s discuss the three major slices of what I have long labeled full-context personalization: individual personalization, which reflect your site visitors’ unique motivators; the ecosystem in which they do business; and the means they use to access the Web.
If you implemented full-context personalization for more than your home market – a rare accomplishment to which many online marketers aspire – then you would create an experience that feels right at home for international users. This ideal doesn’t apply just to business-to-consumer Websites, by the way. As you build out Internet sites to improve the productivity of your employees and optimize the efficiency of your supply chain, you will have to address each of these three slices to some greater or lesser degree.
Individual personalization: Localize the experience for each market.
When you look at “The DaVinci Code” at Amazon.com, you will likely see a recommendation to buy at “Hot Blood, Holy Grail.” But what would it suggest to a Chinese consumer interested in the same Dan Brown book? Would its recommendation engine be sensitive enough to detect that the buyer’s browser is coming in from China? Would it be smart enough to offer a different choice of books? Each consumer and every corporate buyer is driven by a complex set of psychographic motivators that determine how he reacts to a marketing message, brand, or online selling process.
So translating product descriptions won’t be enough. Successful global companies will take the next step and adapt their online marketing techniques to account for national differences in fuzzy motivators such as career, education, and family factors. In the process, their marketing teams will create psychographic profiles that segment their international audiences in each market and in each demographic swath just as they’ve done domestically. A business site might choose to not personalize to an individual but rather to generate company-specific interactions for all purchasing agents at a given company.
Ask yourself: Can your target audience read your message? If they can, does it make sense to them in their cultural context? Consider testing with actual consumers, focus groups, and ethnographic research to determine what works and what doesn’t.
Business ecosystem: Adapt to the buyer’s way of doing business.
People buy on the Web, but the actual transaction takes place behind browser screens on servers, databases, and corporate transaction systems inside your business ecosystem. This complex, entrenched foundation runs your business but typically has to be adapted to deal with country-specific issues such as taxation and with basic logistical issues such as shipping and customer service.
Ask yourself: Could a visitor to your site actually buy something? Would he have the means to pay you? Could you deliver his order, getting it through customs? Don’t rely on your own faculties to answer these questions, but go to the source –poll people in the markets you are targeting via usability studies.
Touch points: Let visitors use what’s customary in their markets to interact.
Traditional Web marketing assumes that online visitors are interacting with them via PCs or Macs. More-ambitious firms are looking to the mobile phones that most people carry. Lots of retail, travel, financial, and even business applications will have many users dialing in from cell phones.
This won’t be a case of just simple reformatting but rather a question of offering different services and targeting appropriate audiences. Experiences on a full-screen PC just won’t work on a Nokia cell phone, so your designers and transaction specialists must dramatically rethink how they interact with their global customers – whether they’re consumers or corporate purchasing agents.
Ask yourself: How will you deal with access by non-PC users? Can you manage to serve technology-deprived areas that have slow networks or bad connections?
The net: Don’t expect to be able to reach this ultimate level of personalization for every international market. Your boss, colleagues, advisers, and budget will reserve this Ritz-Carlton class of service for only the top-tier target countries with the right Internet and economic demographics. For any market that you enter, however, visitors will expect a top-rate treatment of the core content that you do offer along with some linguistic, cultural, and political sensitivity to the unique needs of their market.
Don DePalma is the founder/chief research officer of the research and consulting firm Common Sense Advisory and author of “Business Without Borders: A Strategic Guide to Global Marketing.”
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