Is it a knapsack or a body bag? Multinational marketing must consider local and cultural meanings.
While Americans tend to think of the growth of global business from an American perspective, in truth, multinational business is also the global expansion of European, Asian, and Latin American corporations. This acceleration of foreign multinational expansion brings with it many marketing challenges, among them: sorting through vast differences in product preferences, maneuvering through local customs, building cohesive brand leadership teams and business partnerships, and surmounting communication limitations.
Surmounting Communication Space and Format Limitations
Language limitations are the most obvious example of communication challenges in a multinational environment. In a world connected by the Internet and world wide web, marketers struggle with which languages to offer on their website, and whether to include on-demand website language translation. In regional markets with minority populations, the debate over whether to place advertising on both English language and Hispanic TV and radio has a practical side. The number of words to say the same thing in both languages is quite different; the longer Spanish translation can create print production challenges.
Communicating Differences in Product Preferences
Central to the marketing challenge facing multinational companies is communicate major product attributes. The way a product tastes, why it works the way it does, even the appeal of the ingredients, can become communication points. But these things can mean different things in different countries. Communication messages must accommodate the near certainty that a McDonald's Big Mac and fries in Russia will taste differently than the same meal in America. Communications messages can either be country-specific, requiring multiple versions, or they can focus on a higher attribute of the product (for example the dining experience, rather than the specific taste or shape or product crispness). Multi-national brands often create entirely different menus, which necessitate costly, custom communication programs to support the product mix.
One of China's most famous brands, Shanghai Jahwa United, is preparing to roll its home grown skin care product line, VIVE, to the US. In China, the traditional Chinese medicine ingredients of the113-year-old brand are a key selling point. But communicating the brand in the U.S., where culture and tradition are not yet brand attributes, necessitate a vastly different communication message than in its home country.
Maneuvering Through the Challenges of a Product's Name or Product Terms
Global marketers discovered long ago that caution is required to market products in foreign countries. No where is this more true than with the product name. With the best of intentions, companies have been known to roll out products with perfectly acceptable names, only to find that in another language the name means something quite different. For instance the American product we call "knapsacks" in German translates to "body bags." The famous name of the baby food maker, Gerber in French means "vomiting." After an initial naming misstep in China, Coke researched 40,000 Chinese characters and settled on a close phonetic equivalent, "ko-kou-ko-le," which means "happiness in the mouth." Even Binney & Smith Crayola replaced the color "flesh" with "peach" to recognize that the world holds a wide variety of skin tones.
Building Cohesive Brand Communication Teams
A strong brand team is necessary to execute marketing communication on a multinational level, but challenges lie in the very nature of the team's diversity. Rather than the centralized structure of a national organization, a multinational company's brand communications team tends to be scattered around the globe; incorporating many cultures, languages and business styles. This can make local communication stronger, but communication continuity among the team difficult. It can also affect the ability of a brand team to function at high capacity, or maintain the consistent marketing processes necessary to handle the communication volume of a global organization.
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