branding in the global marketplace
DESCRIPTION
Learn from top global experts from strategic branding firm Siegel+Gale in a free webinar as they share their insights on how brands create and deliver messages and experiences across the globe, while protecting the brand as it grows.The webinar will cover:+ Why understanding the true drivers of customer choice across markets is essential to positioning a brand for success+ How to accommodate local markets, which despite globalization continue to behave in their own unique way+ What are the best practices for the technical side of global brand management, which requires a strategic and cost-conscious approach to creating and managing global trademarks, linguistics, and URL negotiations+ How global brands are creating customer experiences that tell the story in a local voice, both online and offlineTRANSCRIPT
Branding in the Global Marketplaceexcerpt from our webinar
June 8, 2010
www.siegelgale.com
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Overview
+ Ensuring brands are relevant, wherever they are in the world
+ Global trademarks and the challenges of naming global brands
+ Creating websites for a global audience
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Meet the panel
Fred BurtManaging Director, [email protected]
Jeff LapatineGroup Director, [email protected]
Thomas MuellerGlobal Director, Dynamic [email protected]
Making brands relevant across the globe
Presented by: Fred Burt
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When the world is so complex, being global is hard.
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Designed to simplify choice
+ How do customers make choices (really make choices!)?
+ How do they rate brands in these choice terms?
+ Where are opportunities to be more of the “brand of choice”?
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Naming
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Language
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Tonality
“Good morning, how are you today?”
+ In US = polite, enthusiastic
+ In Germany = intrusive and over-familiar
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1. Look for universal drivers of choice
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4. It’s complicated enough, so keep it simple
Global trademarksCreating names for the global marketplace
Presented by: Jeff Lapatine
What makes creating global trademarks so hard?
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1. Is someone else already using the name?
+ In general, we need only worry about trademarks in the same class. So, Infiniti Solutions, a company that makes circuit boards, needn’t worry about the trademark for Infiniti, the car brand.
+ But even in the same class, the same name may be registered by different applicants.
+ This becomes a question of “degree of possible confusion.”
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2. What about different spellings?
+ The rule of thumb is that if two names sound the same, trademark problems can arise.
+ But names with different spellings do often live in the same trademark class.
+ For example, both Veriti and Verity are registered as trademarks in the electrical and scientific class. Possibly these companies reached an agreement.
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3. Big fish/Small fish?
+ Should a big company just use the name it likes and not worry about lawsuits from a small player? Some argue that big companies can ignore smaller fish in the pond.
+ With the Internet, the global pond has gotten a lot bigger. And smaller fish may look for a big pay day.
+ Trademark attorneys have become more conservative regarding this issue.
4. What if the name isn’t registered?
+ Even here, the situation is murky.
+ You don’t have to formally register a name to have trademark protection. Establishing that you use the name in the marketplace may be sufficient.
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Without an online preliminary check, the cost and time requirement of a global preliminary search can be exorbitant
These costs are incurred for each name that is searched!
Global URL issues
The gorilla in the room
+ More than half of the names we screen are not available as trademarks.
+ Less than 10% of these names will be available as a dot-com URL.
Non-Latin domain names can bring even greater costs and risks
+ The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the Internet since its beginning.
+ Previously, the only possible characters were the letters “A” through “Z” and the numbers zero through nine.
+ Now 100,000 additional characters from a slew of languages will be available.
Linguistics
Is the name appropriate for global markets?
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How do you decide which countries to test?
+ Will this definitely be an area of global expansion?
+ What languages are spoken in the country? (census as a tool)
+ Where have previous products or services been launched?
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In sum
Trademark search and availability, URL registrations, and linguistic considerations make securing global names very difficult.
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Websites for a global audience
Presented by: Thomas Mueller
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Keys to the successful creation of a global website
+ Examine what can be localized and what aspects must be globally controlled.
+ Don’t underestimate the time, cost, and importance of proper localizing and translating.
+ Don’t forget about the brand.
+ Establish a governance structure.
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What can be done locally?
+ “To create sites that delight local audiences, web designers must act in accordance with linguistic and cultural preferences”.
+ Establish a clear set of user experience criteria into “must have” requirements.
– Content & navigation– User interface & look and feel– Performance & trust
+ Leverage global best practices, such as presentation templates and info graphics.
+ Mix with local assets, such as photography, video, and localized content.
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What should be handled at a global level?
+ Technology and operations need to be streamlined— create one central platform with decentralized access for content creation and ongoing management.
+ Gather globally and locally shared user needs and business requirements.
+ Develop universally relevant content strategy for key audience segments to ensure messaging consistency.
+ Establish universally applicable voice principles to guide local content creation and translation.
+ Create universally needed common building blocks (templates).
Invest based on revenue and growth potential – Top eight country sites at Hilton International account for more than 50% of the company’s revenue. Focus your
resources on areas of greatest return. (Source: Forrester)
Invest based on revenue and growth potential—top eight country sites at Hilton International account for more than 50% of the company’s
revenue. Focus your resources on areas of greatest return. (Source: Forrester)
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Translation can’t be an afterthought
+ Focusing on a scalable, globally and locally relevant content strategy is critical at the earliest stages of every international initiative.
+ Set up a content steering committee with the right mix of global and local stakeholders to build a shared vision early and enable planning for execution at all levels subsequently.
+ Translations traditionally take place downstream in the authoring process.
Sixty-four percent of internationalized sites appear in four or more local versions, managed 69% of the time with multiple
distinct content management systems. (Source: Forrester)
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Don’t forget about the brand!
+ Managing a global web presence means maintaining the right level of oversight on your brand and messaging.
+ Establishing a governance structure to set a framework for a global web presence is critical to successfully managing the brand and overall user experience.
+ Rogue sites are a serious problem. They are created when companies fail to implement effective policies and governance and they tend to damage brand consistency, voice, and user experience.
+ To mitigate this and proactively manage brand and experience, the governance team should establish and distribute localization guidelines with templates and relevant assets—create a brand site.
+ Usefulness of guidelines needs to be evaluated on a quarterly basis and new content needs to be presented, reviewed, and approved.
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Checklist
Do we have best practice requirements in place?
Do we have a strong content strategy in place?
Do we have a global governance team set up?
Are we aligned with IT around a centralized CMS?
Are we creating guidelines and usage examples globally and sharing locally?
Do we have a brand site in place?
Do we have localization, not just translation, partners in place?
+ For more of our ideas, opinions, and thought leadership visit our blog: www.siegelgale.com/ideas
+ Follow us on Twitter @siegelgale
Thank you.