Translation and Global Marketing Missteps: Don’t let Global Content Missteps Trip You Up
By Rebecca Ray*
What ever happened to the H&M boycott ? “Coolest monkey in the jungle ? What happened ? Ya shopping there ? These H&M shops looks pretty full. pic.twitter.com/1MG1zYaiQl— JAY MULA (@iamjaymula) February 16, 2019
Companies still learn the hard
way that almost all the content they publish – or that is created by their
customers and prospects – is global.
Whether or not content is translated or
intended for a specific audience, all viewers have access to it and make their
opinions heard at the global level – especially if they have negative feelings.
As content plays a larger strategic role in business success, organizations are
looking for ways to do a better job to world-proof the words, images, and audio
that project their brand.
In this article, we describe the challenge of global content missteps, provide examples, and offer advice on how to avoid becoming a
bad localization meme.
Firms generally recognize that
content has value in supporting their brand worldwide and attracting and
retaining customers. However, executives tend to over-invest in the creation of
the original material while scrimping on the localized versions upon which they
often depend for a hefty portion of their revenue.
This disproportionate
spending frequently results in a lack of oversight during the design phase,
which can lead to embarrassing, if not disastrous, results in terms of PR.
Worse yet, the missteps can cause a reduction in overall brand value and market
cap numbers over the short term, as well as adversely impact the career path
for C-level executives.
All organizations want to
avoid being the poster child of global marketing missteps. Yet, examples
unfortunately appear all too often:
H&M’s catalog miscalculation
Regardless of one’s opinion of
its appropriateness, you have to wonder how the original product and
accompanying marketing content for a T-shirt ad in January 2018 survived
internal review at fast-fashion retailer H&M.
Even if its home base in
Sweden was not offended by the product, H&M only had to ask personnel in
top markets such as the United States, Germany, France, or the United Kingdom
what they thought before proceeding with the design idea.
As a result, H&M
lost clothing line collaborators such as Weeknd and faced a high level of
backlash from U.S. customers.
Image 1: H&M advertises a product without thinking through its global
implications
Source: H&M online offering in the United Kingdom
Source: H&M online offering in the United Kingdom
United Airlines’ damage control goes awry
Asia has always been a
strategic market for United – long before the rise of China – so one would
expect that its corporate behavior is followed closely. However, the company’s
crisis response team failed to take that into account when news broke about an
outsourced security team dragging a passenger off one of its planes under
rather violent circumstances. It turned into an international incident as
hundreds of millions (not thousands) of people commented on Weibo, with some
even cutting up their United frequent flyer cards. Calls for boycotts spread
throughout Asia – especially worrying since China is the second-largest market
in the world for aviation and still growing. The company briefly lost almost
US$1 billion due to the incident.
When the review forum Yelp
announced via Twitter last year that it was entering the Turkish market, it
rather oddly chose the image of a church for a country that is overwhelmingly
Muslim – comparable to using a mosque graphic for an announcement targeted at
North Americans. That being said, the church image didn’t match what most Turks
see in their country, as the construction of Christian Orthodox churches
doesn’t resemble the humble wood building depicted in the image. But even more
bothersome to many Turks was the mention of the Trojan Horse used to hide Greek
soldiers for an ambush during the war for Troy.
Image 2: Yelp selects a tone-deaf image to enter the Turkish market
Source: Yelp.com
The companies in the examples
cited are certainly not the only global brands that have stumbled over global
messaging and content. Yet it’s impossible for even the most global-savvy
person or team to recognize all possible cross-cultural reactions to a particular
message, image, or video. So, what is a company to do?
Read more: TCWorld
*Rebecca Ray is a senior analyst at market research firm Common Sense Advisory (CSA Research).
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