Global marketing strategies,- Globalization can be a very challenging process for any organization. It can also take some companies by surprise as they outgrow their initial local plans. This brings cultural, language, process and many other challenges. With the growth of digital, almost all businesses have an international presence through the internet even if their target audience is very localized and so some aspect of global strategy should be included in almost every digital strategy – even if that aspect is to ensure that global presence is minimized.
Culture
There are many cultural differences around the world, too many to count, and the relevant ones must be understood when building a global strategy. This can range from religious beliefs to manners and it is impossible to know what we don’t know – so doing your research is important here.
From a digital perspective there are several cultural considerations. You should look at whether each region you are targeting responds well to buying online and, if not, whether your strategy should focus on thought leadership, brand awareness and directing people to your offline conversion channels. Understanding the penetration of smartphones and tablets alongside mobile coverage will also influence your strategy. For example, at the time of writing, Google’s Consumer Barometer tells us that Norway has 79 per cent smartphone penetration whilst Japan, perhaps surprisingly, has only 54 per cent (Google, 2015). This could mean that moving to a responsive website is more or less of a priority for your business and you may not require the app that you have budgeted for. You will also need to understand broadband speeds and coverage as this will dictate how fast your website and off-site content will download and, therefore, the design of your assets.
Lifestyle points such as working hours and average commute times will influence your targeting and customer support programmes. Even weather, which is not cultural itself but does influence culture, is an important factor to consider as it will affect the amount of time spent indoors (near computers) and outdoors (on mobile or offline). It is also important to understand that the digital landscape may be very different in territories away from your local country. In Europe and the United States you would most likely consider Twitter at the core of your micro-blogging strategy whereas in China you would be more likely to need to look at Sina Weibo. Thoroughly researching cultural points and ensuring you are working with, or at least speaking to, local people with strong knowledge are important considerations – getting this right can be incredibly powerful and getting this wrong can be extremely damaging.
Language
Language is perhaps the most obvious consideration but one that must be considered very carefully. To give a potent example of how important this is, some organizations have been guilty of not considering language when creating their global brand and identity – leading to a name that, when translated, has been found to mean something rude in other countries. There are many examples of this and it leaves your business with four very difficult options: don’t trade in that country, create a separate brand just for that country, change your brand name entirely, or do nothing and accept the damage and criticism. The prouder leaders often go for the last option, whereas option two is perhaps the most sensible. Some interesting examples of this are that Galaxy chocolate in the UK is known as Dove in many other countries; Burger King in Australia is Hungry Jack’s; and T. K. Maxx is the international name for the company that is known as T. J. Maxx in the United States.
For digital marketing, language is clearly important when considering digital presence. This is not only in ensuring that our call to actions are correct and powerful but also in dealing with languages with different characters to our own. For example English, Russian, Mandarin and Arabic are all widely spoken languages but all use different characters that need to be accounted for. This can create tricky design challenges when building your site.
Payments
This is a very specific category but one that is worth highlighting as it can dramatically affect the result of your digital strategy. Payment methods are often overlooked when constructing a global strategy but it is very dangerous to assume that the world uses the same methods. Even countries that you would assume are very similar to your own may in fact be very different. One example of this is Germany where roughly 80 per cent of transactions are conducted in cash. For comparison, this figure in the United States is less than 50 per cent (Bagnall et al, 2014). Germans hold roughly twice the amount of cash in their wallets as people in France or Australia. This behaviour is of course vitally important to appreciate when developing an e-commerce strategy.
Brand
Your brand is one of the key parts of your business that you must align with at all times. This is understood by most people and so I am sure there is no need to spend too much time convincing you that this is the case. There are, however, some vital reasons for this that are worth examining. I often talk to people about how considering your company’s brand as a person can be a powerful framework. The values of your company are like the values that you hold yourself. You may try to be polite to everyone you meet, you may be someone who wants to achieve a lot in life and you may be always looking to learn more and grow your knowledge. These values in a business could be translated as service, sales and innovation and they create the personality of your business.
Further, your brand has what non-marketers often consider a brand to be – a visual identity. What is your logo and how does it look in different scenarios? What is your colour palette? How do you design your materials? Again, this could translate into what do you look like, do you keep fit, how do you dress and what are your favourite colours? By combining your values and visual identity you create your personality and look, and therefore your brand. When you assess whether something strays from this brand you get a very easy to understand perspective about whether this feels right or not.
Values
As we have just discussed, the brand values of your organization are its personality, and having a consistent personality is important to enable consumers to understand you and therefore believe in you. Your digital strategy must therefore stay true to these values and to how they are expressed elsewhere (unless how they are expressed elsewhere is poor and you can drive improvement in those areas).
Visual identity
Your visual identity can be difficult to control and easy to compromise online and so discipline is important. There are many opportunities to stretch your logo or tweak your colour palette to fit in with another website or digital opportunity, and staying true to your guidelines is vital here wherever possible. Compromising your visual identity can create a lack of trust as you can appear less like an organization that is in control. To that point it is key to remember that your guidelines must work for digital. It is certainly less true now than it was 10 years ago, but some guidelines still are not built with digital in mind. An understanding of accessibility rules for colours, challenges around using your logo on other sites such as affiliates, and creation of logos or icons that work in limited spaces, must be built into your guidelines. Your identity may already be in use in newspapers, on television, in direct mail and on stationery. Your consumers will be seeing these in their day-to-day lives and so ensuring consistency with these is vital. In Chapter 6 we look at how consistent messaging at every step on your digital channels, such as paid search, creates a far more powerful result – and the same is true of your brand.
Innovation and pushing the boundaries is important, especially in digital, but not at the expense of a consistent face of your business as this will be detrimental to your organization as a whole.
Vision
Look at your mission and how you build your goals and objectives from this to effectively plan the delivery of your strategy. Sitting above all of this, however, is your vision. This is the statement that must embody everything your business is striving to achieve and everything it represents. Your company is likely to have a vision in place and if not you should consider whether it is appropriate for you to review this with your leadership team. This summary of what you stand for can be powerful when talking to investors, shareholders and customers alike. Whatever your company vision, it is important that every strategy within your organization fits within this vision, otherwise you run the risk of delivering something that does not align with the direction of your business.
A vision would read something like this:
- ‘To be Earth’s most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.’ (Amazon)
- ‘To bring JOY to the lives of our customers, whether they are kids or kids at heart.’ (Toys’R’Us)
You can ensure that your strategy aligns with your vision by adjusting some of your goals, channels and messaging. Using the above examples your strategy could be adjusted as follows. If you were building a digital strategy for Amazon you may want to ensure that you have robust service response processes in place on social media and through other channels and you should consider everything we discussed above on customer centricity. You should also be focused on creating a deep level of personalization to be able to deliver the latter part of the vision.
For Toys’R’Us on the other hand, you would want to look at how your site can create enjoyment through the experience of accessing it and to ensure that there are activities for all ages. Understanding the needs of children as well as the adult shoppers is also important in order to be able to create a fun and therefore enticing experience.
Research and insight
Research is a driving force behind any strategy and so understanding what your data is telling you is vital to the success of your strategy. You may have a specific research function and separate insight team, both together or neither. Whatever the capabilities within your organization it is important to bring broader research
Quantitative research is usually used when trying to gather data to validate a hypothesis or support a business case. This is the type of research that some would consider more ‘real’ in terms of there being a clear story backed up by undisputable facts. The limitation of quantitative research is that whilst it can give you a clear view of the ‘what’ it does not always tell you the ‘why’. So if 100 people were to visit your website from a competitor and 300 from a news website then you will be able to make some decisions about media buying such as whether to continue your display advertising on the news website and expand to other news sites or whether to put more resource into competing with your competitors more effectively on the search channel. Without understanding why this happened, however, you cannot get to the bottom of the issue and therefore cannot understand if this will be an ongoing trend or a single peak.
Qualitative research has quite the opposite challenge. With this research method you can gain a deep understanding of the motivations and thoughts of customers and consumers. You can understand what they like and do not like about you or your marketing materials. You can understand what excites them and what really gets them down. You cannot, however, directly apply this to sales. If someone says they don’t like your advertising then this does not necessarily mean that they will not buy your product.
One commonly used research method is therefore to use both qualitative and quantitative together. An example of this is to circulate a data collection method such as an online questionnaire in order to gain quantitative data from which to construct a qualitative piece of research. That research would then be gathered from the same participants and the data could tell a more compelling story.
KPIs
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are an essential method of measuring the success of your campaign. The reason for taking a quick look at this now is to ensure that, when building your reporting and dashboards for your campaign, you align the measures of success with those of the business. We have discussed that there are different business models with different objectives, visions and cultures. These will ultimately dictate what the business KPIs are – and if you are going to ensure that your strategy is accepted by your decision makers and is perceived to be a success then you will need to be shown to be delivering what the company needs to deliver. As well as this consideration you will also need to be agile enough to align with any changes to the company’s KPIs that you may not be expecting. It is entirely possible, and in fact quite common, for a business to change its primary goal, for example, from acquiring a large volume of customers to maximizing profit. This could be due to market conditions, shareholder demands or activity by the competition, amongst many other factors.
Business KPIs could come in hundreds of different forms such as customer numbers, customer satisfaction, profit, sales, retention and share price – the more top-level metrics that determine the success of a business in a given period.