Discover how to make your marketing campaigns make sales in any market
Attention, Traveling Executives!
All you have to do is get inside the mind of your target market. We’ll explain how you can do that.
Your thinking is different from your target’s thinking. Your experiences are different. Your likes are different. Your word are different. Your fashion is different. Your food is different. Your history is different. And you may be targeting the wrong target.
The words you use in your advertising can have very different and inappropriate meaning than what you intended. The symbols you chose in your ads could have vulgar meaning. The ingredients you use are more likely not the preferred taste of your targets.
Can you see the difficulty you can have trying to sell to someone you have not understood? There are too many things you, as an outsider, must understand and know quickly to launch your campaign successfully.
How can you be so different and still have a successful marketing campaign?
Your Greatest Asset
Get a local insider to help you get to the answers you need. They know and understand the taste and thinking of your target market. More importantly, they belong to the culture you need to make sales in.
A local cultural expert can explain why your target wont’ buy. The timing of your campaign might be wrong due to religious reasons. An ingredient may be considered unhealthy and you need to remove it and or replace it for your product to sell. Maybe your campaign colors are wrong. Maybe your intended words don’t translate correctly. They can point out things that you don’t know so you can make decisions that’ll have a profitable return.
Your Return
You can save time energy, money and embarrassment by having an insider as your secret weapon. They can explain and show your proper ways to greet. They can show you proper ways to exchange business cards. They can show you proper dinner and other social etiquette so you do not accidentally offend your host country. Your local insider can help you save your business from a very expensive mistake.
Multinational Company Costly Mistakes
Your ad could be insulting. McDonalds’ ad was seen as offensive by Chinese consumers. An electronics company’s commercial was also received with negativity. The Chinese consumers felt the character of the Chinese actor was in bad taste.
Toyota is not immune of making the outsiders’s mistake. Toyota’s two print ads in 2003 were used symbols that were offensive to Chinese consumers. There were phone call and calls for boycotting the company’s products. Toyota stopped the campaigns and printed apologies to help ease the anger the campaigns produces from consumers and the general Chinese public.
Toshiba paid out $1.5B to American consumers. Toshiba also lost 4% marketshare.
Your company can still make expensive mistakes no matter how similar a company’s executives are to the host country. Foreign markets are foreign markets. The cultural differences cannot be ignored.
Multinational companies (MNC) must understand and fit into the local culture. All MNCs must have local because locals instinctively know the “subtitles of the” market “and how to navigate the often murky environment.
Colgate-Palmolive and The Proctor and Gamble Co. received negative attention in the Chinese media that caused market share loss. The loss was because of a toothpaste that included trimlosan that was known to cause cancer under specific conditions.