Brand Quarterly JULY 2014 - Global Marketing Special Edition

GLOBAL MARKETING SPECIAL EDITION

In association with the Brand2Global Conference, London 2014

SPECIAL EDITION IN THIS ISSUE

Influencer Insights: Rashmi Schaefers, head of localization at SAP From Marketing To Consumers - To Mattering To People How To Use Mobile To Grow Your Global Business Social Data As A Gift To Localised Marketing Brand2Global Conference Program Preview

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Featured This Issue:

4 Adapt Or Die: How To Best Approach Web-Localization Efforts Julio Leal | Ciena

8 Influencer Insights: Rashmi Schaefers Vice President, Content Services And Localization | SAP

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16 Paving The Way To Customer Experience On The Digital Globalization Front Line Bruno Herrmann | The Nielsen Company

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Don’t Look A Gift Horse In Behind The Curtain The Mouth: Social Data As A Brand Quarterly Talks With Gift To Localised Marketing Brand2Global Founder Ulrich Henes

30 Sailing The Seas Of Social Media…

Lars Silberbauer | Lego

Katie Rigby-Brown & Brianne Moore | SDL

34 Global Brand Management Is The Management Of Feedback Prof. Dieter Georg Herbst

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From Marketing To Consumers Getting Beyond the Hype: - To Mattering To People: How To Use Mobile To Grow Your Global Business Sharon Johnson | RE:PURPOSE & Kate Cox | Havas Media

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Jamie Turner | 60 Second Communications

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Influencer Insights: Susie Hamlin

Language: The Vital Heart Of Your Brand Strategy

Director Of Global Strategy And Advocacy | Cisco

Alison Toon | Smartling

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66 Trends In Consumer Loyalty Kyle Clark | MasterCard

Learn Winning Strategies for Global Branding & Digital Media Success

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Brand2Global Conference Program Preview Find out what’s awaiting you in London at Brand2Global 2014

conference INNOVATIVE GLOBAL MARKETING STRATEGIES

LONDON From The Editor October 1-2 2014

THIS YEAR’S SPEAKERS INCLUDE REPRESENTATIVES FROM: Lenovo

Affectiva

Brand2Global is a conference for executives in Global Marketing, focusing on 4 key areas:

Microsoft

Carat

Accenture

Havas Media

• Global Digital Media

Volvo Cars

PetLove.com.br

Everybody Glocal!!

• Global Branding Get • Global Marketing Campaigns

• Global Customer Experience

As a gathering of representatives business and Welcome to our first everfromSpecial EditionLegoof Brand Quarterly.

Jampp other stakeholder groups - this conference is the place to be for any organisation aiming to position itself as a leader in the field of Global Marketing.

Working closely with our friends at The Google LocalizationUber Institue - the team behind the Brand2Global Nielsen SAP Conference in London this October 1st & 2nd - we have gathered insights from marketers and REGISTER NOW and join the other Kasperskey Lab SDL top Global Marketing decision globalization/localization experts, from iconic companies such as Lego, Mastercard, SAP and makers attending in 2014.

KLM Zipcar Cisco to name just a few.

This Take issueadvantage is jam-pack, from cover cover, with speakers of our Early Birdto Discount through Augustfrom 8 this years Brand2Global conference and their world respected list of Program Advisory Board members. We will have even www.brand2global.com more great content coming your way as we continue connecting with speakers from this years event, so be sure to keep an eye on brandquarterly.com for more from our Brand2Global family over the coming weeks.

I hope you enjoy this Special Edition as much as your regular fix of Brand Quarterly, and find inspiration and vauable insights to help you grow globally.

If you have any feedback, requests or would like to partner with us for a future Special Edition, please email us at studio@veseycreative.com As always, if you love it, share it. Thanks.

Brand Quarterly magazine GLOBAL MARKETING SPECIAL EDITION JULY 2014 www.brandquarterly.com Publisher/Design: Vesey Creative Ltd studio@veseycreative.com

Fiona

As the publishers of Brand Quarterly, we take every care in the production of each issue. We are however, not liable for any editorial error, omission, mistake or typographical error.

The views expressed are those of the contributors and not necessarily those of their respecitve companies or the publisher.

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Copyright: This magazine and the content published within are subject to copyright held by the publisher, with individual articles remaining copyright to the named contributor.

Express written permission of the publisher and contributor must be acquired for reproduction.

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Adapt Or Die: How To Best Approach Web-Localization Efforts Julio Leal | Ciena Adaptation is all about survival. If a website is to survive and succeed, it needs to adapt constantly - the alternative isn’t an option.

But what happens when a company has multiple websites, each of them serving a specific local market in its native language and with its’ own local peculiarities?

Simple - the company’s adaptation effort multiplies exponentially.

Many companies wrongly believe they are prepared for the exponential content and management growth resulting from localization. The first clear sign of this error is that a company’s website localization strategy is not, directly or indirectly, managed by a localization professional. Frequently, organizations give website localization oversight responsibilities to a marketing team that has very limited knowledge of the particular challenges of localization.

If there is no localization manager on the team yet, consider hiring one. This person will be able to determine the best content translation approach, engage with the right vendors, establish quality metrics, and ensure a fair price for any translations. In addition, having staff assigned to this specialized role will help the company’s localization model mature more rapidly.

Additionally, when analyzing the local or regional markets to target, companies often consider translation to be imperative. Due to the peculiarities of some industries and countries, and depending on whether the company is in a B2B or B2C category, English might be the language used (and expected) by the target audience in that specific market.

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For example, Ciena recently ceased providing full support for Arabic in the Middle East region after discovering that, due to the fact that many users of Ciena content in that market were educated in British and North-American universities, English is the preferred language of business for that region. Companies that do not speak their customers’ language risk losing their business.

How is this sort of information uncovered?

Quite simply, metrics tattle. Trends change, users evolve, and industries move. An agile organization keeping pace with the market needs mechanisms to identify what is

Building Your Business From The Brand Up

happening in that market so it can react accordingly.

This is especially relevant when translating marketing materials. The right use of the appropriate metrics can provide each market with their own content preferences. For instance, they can reveal which markets prefer videos over print collateral, and - even more specifically - if a voiceover is preferred to subtitles on those videos. Ciena learned, for example, that its Japanese and Korean Web users are more comfortable reading subtitles than watching videos with audio in their local language - just the opposite of users in the CALA region.

Targeted metrics will also help identify which products or services most interest Web users, allowing companies to focus their translation efforts more accurately and thereby utilize their budgetary resources more effectively.

Additionally, because user behavior is not static, metrics can let companies know when to modify their localization approaches when needed. As the case in point, Ciena will resume full support for Arabic again if research indicates a need to do so.

Finally, organizations should consider the quality of the translation provided. The main challenge here for many companies is that sometimes it is almost impossible

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to control how good translations are when dealing with highly populated and evolving websites. However, if the company considers its websites an important asset within a complete global marketing strategy, quality cannot be left aside.

The best way to tackle this concern is by dividing the Web into different tiers based on the level of visibility. For instance, the homepage and one-click-away pages would be Tier 1, two-clicks-away pages would be Tier 2, and the rest would be Tier 3. Based on this approach, the company should focus all quality efforts on the Tier 1 content, as these pages usually represent the highest percentage of Web visits. Quality on Tier 2 could be managed using random quality spot checks, and Tier 3 pages, which are normally a residual percentage of total visits, could be completely ignored.

Additionally, companies should return to their metrics to identify and fully customize these tiers on each local website, as some pages will definitively be more relevant than others depending on the market. This approach will allow the most efficient use of all translation quality mechanisms, avoiding unnecessary checks of non-visited and irrelevant pages.

uestion Time:

Why is it important for Global Marketers to be continually learning and developing?

To really thrive in the volatile and dynamic global economy, we as ‘Global Marketers’ need high-end knowledge skills to handle the emerging challenges of multiculturalism, fragmented consumer needs, digital convergence, ubiquitous computing, personalization, and global institutional idiosyncrasies. We need to actively seek out opportunities to learn about these emerging global complexities, and more specifically the emerging mega-trends and ideas around branding, marketing and digital media. After all, we as ‘Global Marketers’ have to constantly renew our skills and outlook to continually balance the needs of localization with the demands of globalization.

In short, to keep all Web pages from becoming irrelevant, businesses should use all their available metrics to get to know their global users and customize the localized content accordingly.

Dr Nitish Singh Associate Professor of International Business Boeing Institute of International Business, St Louis University

Julio Leal Head of Localization | Ciena Julio Leal is the head of the localization team at Ciena Corporation since 2010. Before joining Ciena, he worked at SAP as the localization manager responsible for the EMEA marketing hub. Fluent in Spanish, English and German, he holds an MA in Translation and Interpreting Studies from the University of Granada in Spain, and he recently obtained an Executive Certificate in Web Globalization Management from John Cook School of Business.

www.ciena.com 6

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Rashmi Schaefers Vice President, Content Services And Localization | SAP Fiona Vesey | Vesey Creative

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In talking with Rashmi, it was abundantly clear she has a true passion for sharing her knowledge and expertise in the localization field. As a genuine thought leader in the industry, I really appreciate Rashmi allowing me a window into her years of experience managing international marketing and roll-out programs. - Thanks Rashmi.

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Fiona Currently, you’re the VP of Content Services and Localization at SAP, which as we know is a huge multinational corporation. Can you share with us a little of where you started your career?

Rashmi Absolutely, it’s interesting, because my first job out of university was at Sybase, which has now been acquired by SAP - it just shows you how everything comes full circle in your life. And what’s more interesting is that first role that I had at Sybase was in the corporate marketing department as an international marketing manager.

There, we were doing what we now know as localization and roll-out today. This meant basically taking all the materials, the programs and campaigns that were developed centrally in the marketing department at Sybase, helping the countries and regions get access to that and ensure that it’s in their language. And ensuring the central teams also understood the local requirements.

So that’s how I started out my career and now years later I’m leading an organization at SAP that is responsible for creation and localization of marketing content.

Rashmi Early on localization was really considered just translation. So we were just making sure that the content was accurately translated in the target language.

A critical change that has happened over the years - especially for multinational companies in the IT industry, who tend have their headquarters in the US – is that the global economic landscape has shifted. The strength of the US economy has declined in relative terms, due to booming economies other countries such as China, India.

There are also a lot of other fast growing markets, such as in Latin America or Eastern Europe where companies have to invest in order to ensure revenue growth. Due to the rise of globalization and this shift in economic power, companies must be able to work seamlessly in different countries, more than ever before.

Fiona It’s definitely a business requirement in today’s market.

Rashmi Yes - and it’s a fundamental change.

Fiona How would you say the term ‘Localization’ has changed over that time?

Things have evolved a lot since then for obvious reasons. For global companies today, localization is an absolute business requirement and can be a competitive advantage for companies who do it well.

It goes beyond just having materials and content available in language. It’s about considering all factors – such as culture, tonality, business context, industry – that enable companies to truly communicate with their local customer or audience.

The other factor is that consumers in these markets are becoming more and more sophisticated, and they have higher expectations than ever before. This is why localization must be more than just translation, it is also about local culture, colloquialisms, and in general, how business is done in this local context. Consumers expect this and it is now a basic business requirement.

At the end of the day, it’s about understanding your customer and then investing in what it takes to be able to reach them in the most effective way.

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Fiona Absolutely, and that must be exciting for you from your starting point, being able to see the evolution of all of it.

Rashmi Absolutely.

Fiona In your role leading content services and localization at SAP, what do you see as your number one objective?

Rashmi It’s an interesting position to be in actually, especially in a company like SAP, which is so huge and has been really growing tremendously - we have about 70,000 employees now through all the acquisitions over the last several years.

There are a few things that are really important for us right now. One of those is really understanding and reaching not only our customer, but also our customers’ customer. You’ll see us in fact marketing to the users of our customers’ products, so that they understand how they’re benefiting from the fact our customers are leveraging SAP products and software. This creates an extensive “network effect” that actually has a significant impact on the global economy. So that makes the whole concept of localization – and how we communicate to through to our global business network including our customer’s customers -- even more important.

German company; as we’ve reached such a global status that people don’t always know where we come from.

We have an interesting dichotomy here in Germany, because we obviously have a large enterprise space where SAP has claimed 99% of the market. On the other hand we also have a very strong presence in the small and medium size business market, which is a very powerful market here. There are 1000s of these companies. They have a tremendous economic influence but they’re a very different market. These folks don’t speak necessarily speak fluent English and you cannot assume that they’re going to understand something with foreign connotation automatically.

Not only that, but they’re very deep into whatever industry they’re in. So you have to actually go even deeper from a localization perspective than if you’re targeting only large enterprises. You have to understand not only the local colloquialism of that particular market but also the industry speak in-order to be able to connect with them.

Fiona Excellent. So by connecting with your customers’ customers, you become more valuable to your actual customers. And it also helps create a second sphere of brand loyalty.

Rashmi Yes. One of the pivotal changes that has happened in the last decade is the rise of social media. Because users are now able to

That’s a really key point right now. Language is a given - everything needs to be in a local language. It’s about making sure that you’re tailoring your messaging and that you’re able to really ‘speak’ to that target audience.

So that might be very different even for example, in a country like Germany, which is obviously a very important market for SAP. A lot of people don’t actually know SAP is a 10

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reach and interact with each other through social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook and make recommendations, what we’re seeing is a whole shift in terms of who’s controlling the brand. This is in fact an opportunity for brands like SAP, because we are able to take part those conversations and gain tremendous insights into our customers and their perceptions of our products. As such, through social media we can stay close to our customers, understand what is trending, and react in real time.

And, most of the time our customers are having a dialogue with ‘each other’. We’re not necessarily involved. This is the beauty of it - we can get to the heart of our customers’ perceptions, interests and motivations without doing expensive focus groups or having a complicated infrastructure to gain this information. We can get it real time now, and so I see it as a tremendous opportunity and a game changer in fact.

Fiona Not only is it real time, it’s also an open and honest way of communicating. You’re listening and hearing what they have to say rather than directing the conversation to drag answers out of them as in focus groups.

Rashmi Exactly, absolutely - this is a huge opportunity and as I said, it’s a game changer for us right now.

Fiona What are the challenges you face making that connection, when you’re narrowing it down to an industry or region?

Rashmi If you think about SAP, how did we really make our mark? Why did SAP become so successful? They did one thing – gained deep understanding of businesses’ processes in a variety of industries. SAP was one of the

first companies to go deep into finance, or manufacturing, or supply chain in different industries and really understand the intricate differences in relevant countries. This is our DNA and still our core strength.

To translate it to your question, it’s really about deeply understanding those industries where our software is being used and also understanding our customers’ challenges.

This is the crux of being able to “speak our customers’ language.”

It goes beyond foreign language. Even in our industry, in SAP - we have our own language. It’s about being an integral part of that industry, to understand it really well. We have continued that trend and now we’re able to actually partner with ‘our’ customers to translate that benefit over to ‘their’ customers.

It’s interesting that you asked ‘What are the challenges?’ because I actually think it’s the opposite. There are so many opportunities to connect, because a deep knowledge of industry, culture and language opens up the lines of communications with our customers and prospects. And then it goes beyond being just about communicating and becomes about being part of a continuous dialogue.

Fiona What about business, or operational challenges?

Rashmi Something we are seeing across the industry is that marketing budgets are shrinking.

There’s a lot of pressure from an operational perspective on cost cutting, getting efficiencies, increasing our businesses impact and overall, doing more with less.

This is putting a lot of pressure on managers across the industry and I believe localization can actually help to get more impact, if you do it right - if you really understand the principles and you invest up front. You can actually target your marketing investment in

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those markets where you’re going to have the biggest impact.

Localization has tended to be an afterthought.

But I think folks that are well versed in localization can have a big impact, especially given the rise in strategic importance of foreign markets and the need to drive revenue growth in these markets. Localization teams can have an impact on the business to make sure that investments in foreign markets are leveraged appropriately and local programs are efficiently and effectively executed.

Fiona Definitely.

If we where talking about a company that hasn’t gone international yet, who was entering into a new market, and was in the process of adjusting a current campaign for that market. What are the key principles you’d advise them to follow?

Rashmi This is a great topic. Because there are tons of examples of things that haven’t worked, were very expensive or have been a total disaster - because these questions weren’t asked in advance.

The first thing you want to ask is “Who is your target market?” because the local market itself can be split up and can be very different as well. Take the example of Germany earlier and you’re targeting a small or large size business market - There you have differences already.

Then when it comes to localization – and at this point, it may be common sense, but it goes beyond translation. It’s about having the right tonality. Is it a banking market where tonality tends to be more formal, than maybe a more informal developer market?

You have to think about the vernacular, the colloquialisms, making sure that what you’re saying is going to be heard by that audience.

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Fiona To us, of course it’s not just translation anymore, but for someone just dipping their toes in the water - it’s a really key point.

Rashmi Yes. Another important point is that due to the Internet and social media, a ‘war of content’ is being waged these days.

There has been - within the last five years more content produced than ever before.

And due to multi-screen access – laptop, tablet, smartphone – more content is being voraciously consumed. However, if you fail to capture your audience’s interest, someone else will and then you’ve missed out completely. You really have to make sure what you’re trying to communicate is resonating with that audience. Sometimes you see bad translations and think “Oh, that’s cute but it doesn’t quite work” - these are the things that you want to avoid.

Another important factor to consider is the whole concept of images. It has been a struggle for us, even at SAP - such a big, global company, but we have learned that having the right images that are relevant for each market is so critical. Using the wrong image ‘may not’ seem to make a difference - but it could create the completely opposite reaction than what you want.

An example of this is when we rolled out one of our websites and of course the content was perfectly localized in terms of tonality but we didn’t invest enough in local images. There were not enough in our inventory so that for example, countries in the Asian regions, such as in Japan or Korea could have a variety of locally relevant images to use throughout their local website.

There were literally only one or two that they could use, which meant they would have to use almost the same image on every page of their website. Our global branding team, was

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torn because, well SAP is a global company, shouldn’t we be projecting a global image?

Our local marketing teams were saying, no, no, no, in order to be competitive with local companies, you have to show them that we understand this market and they can connect with us.

Fiona You need to change your voice ‘and’ presentation in order to make the same brand or marketing campaign relevant for a different market, to communicate correctly with them and like you said capture their interest.

Rashmi Yes, and not take anything for granted. One more aspect is that not everybody consumes content in the same way.

You might have created for example, a campaign that offers a variety of different ways of communicating with your customers in the US. That’s great, but these are not always the right communication vehicles for every market.

For example, in certain markets, such as the Asian market - written content is not

preferred, but rather multimedia content, picture based content, videos, short snippets, these types of things. They’re much more of a mobile economy and like to consume content over their Smartphones.

On the other hand, brochures or whitepapers tend to be consumed in Western Europe or even in the US. In Asia, that type of marketing material clearly wouldn’t be as effective. So in addition to all the other factors I have already mentioned regarding creating locally relevant content, it’s important to also think about – In which format does your audiences prefer to consume content? You really need to adapt in that perspective as well.

Fiona Understanding how they consume and are interested in receiving the actual material you want them to see.

Rashmi Absolutely. That’s the end goal.

For global marketers, it’s really important that it’s not just about, “Okay we need to roll this global program out to this set of countries.

Checkmark, that’s done, and somehow

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somebody will take it from there.” – To be successful, it really needs to be thought through to the ‘end customer’. How do we make sure this person is touched by what we’re trying to communicate to them?

Fiona Discovering all these things about your markets means data - a whole lot of data.

So in this age of big data, what do you see is key to deciding which local market insights should take precedence over your global market insights?

uestion Time:

What’s the biggest mindshift between a local and global marketing focus?

Moving your marketing strategy from a local to a global perspective is a matter of maturity. Once you realize there is literally a world of opportunities beyond your borders, there will be nothing stopping your growth. Or better yet, there are a number of things that could prevent you from achieving global-readiness - from the background color of your website to the wording of your tagline. For such maturity requires greater awareness of other cultures and whatever worked for your local audience might be disrespectful, unintelligible or just plain silly for consumers in another corner of the globe.

Fabiano Cid Managing Director Ccaps Translation and Localization

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Rashmi Well, when you’re talking about localization, you’re talking about local markets at the end of the day. The task of the localization process is to make a global campaign as locally relevant as possible. So you need to take that data into an account as much as possible.

There’s also a cost aspect. Rarely can you have 100% local and personalized campaigns.

You need to have a balance between the two.

What you just described about balancing your global and local requirements tends to come up for us where we haven’t developed the local market yet. In that situation where you don’t have the demand, or you don’t have the knowledge within the market as much, you really need to lead from a global perspective because it’s much more at that awareness stage of the marketing program. You’re trying to gain awareness and educate your customers and draw them in at that stage.

So that’s where you tend to rely more on your global data.

With SAP HANA for example, we had to educate the market why it was important, why it was going to have a business impact on them, and then as a result we would be able to generate demand or interest within the markets.

When you have a very developed market with a long-standing user base; you have competitors within that market; you have folks that have a very strong interest in that market. You have user groups or even communities within social media and they have a very strong opinion - that’s where I think you can shift over to the local perspective a little bit more.

Fiona Yes, that makes perfect sense.

Now, I understand you’re passionate about sharing your knowledge and experiences Why do you consider it to be important for

global marketers to be continually up-skilling, learning and developing their skills?

Rashmi As a manager - I would tell anyone, whatever field they’re in, the most important thing you can do is to always be learning.

In the context of marketing - this is just such a great question because in the marketing industry, not a whole lot changed before the Internet and digital. This evolution over the last decade or so has revolutionized the marketing industry, with the ability first of all, to directly reach our customers digitally without having a sales team in between. So how do you speak to your customers in a digital environment? That was something that had to be learned. And in fact, that’s why my localization team was setup six years ago - out of that need to know how to speak to our customers in other countries through the web.

Now, something even more exciting has happened, as I talked about earlier, in terms of how through social media, customers and users have more or less taken control of brands.

That’s revolutionized things completely because not only are you able to reach your customers, but it is now possible to really analyze and predict their preferences.

Through predictive analytics, we are able to glean customer insights in a way we were never really able to do before. Now in a

scientific way you’re able to predict what is going to happen, how your customers are going to shift or how your products are going to be selling using certain tactics in your marketing campaigns.

This is something that has - as far as I am concerned, made the field of marketing so much more interesting, and that I think is so important for marketers today to keep on top of. Learning new tools, learning how to reach their customers, learning how customers’ preferences are changing.

There’s also the concept of the 360-degree localization process that we put in place, years ago. Anybody can put together a 360-degree process in anything they do. It basically means you have your task - you execute it and then you have a system in which you can gather feedback. Then you look at that feedback and you see, what worked, what didn’t, how can I learn from that process and how can I optimize it?

That’s another example of how the culture of learning can extend in different ways.

The beauty of conferences, magazines and alike is that you share experiences and best practices. And you hear how other people have the same issues as you and you can learn from them as well. So I think it is critical to have a forum to bring these experiences together and help each other push the envelope and optimize together as an industry.

Fiona Vesey Editor-in-Chief | Brand Quarterly Magazine Fiona is Co-Founder of Vesey Creative, the international Branding and Graphic Design agency behind Brand Quarterly magazine, for which she serves as Editor-in-Chief.

She thrives in partnering with people and companies wanting more than just aesthetically pleasing design, using her natural ability to build relationships, communicate and truly understand clients businesses to create result generating, people focused design and branding - and great magazines...

Fiona is passionate about learning from industry thought leaders and enjoys sharing those conversations with others through her ‘Influencer Insights’ features.

www.veseycreative.com

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Going Beyond Borders And Boundaries: Paving The Way To Customer Experience On The Digital Globalization Front Line Bruno Herrmann | The Nielsen Company “The rest of the world” has to become “most of the world” in today’s global marketing mindsets and practices!

Another executive statement that is easier said than done…

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Building Your Business From The Brand Up

For global audiences, the world is a global village. For globalizing clients it is a global marketplace. For globalizing companies, it is a global opportunity. For all these players, global customer experience is common ground as it creates value for companies, clients and prospects during their mobile, web and social activities; and in their shopper appetite for applications, products or entertainment online.

These facts might lead some global marketing leaders and practitioners to see associated requirements and challenges as straightforward or, even riskier, candidates for oversimplification. That is why reality checks may hurt along the way to digital globalization, which is built on strong brand equity and uncompromised customer centricity around the world.

Here are some observations “from the trenches� that may help open eyes, increase awareness and hopefully guide your efforts in global content and brand effectiveness.

Conceptually, the path to global marketing success cannot be flatter than the world itself. Therefore, it is crucial to get to know your audiences and understand where they live and breathe or how they behave in various environments. Business performance globally is deeply rooted in effective customer experience locally. And local experience is strongly influenced by what people do, like, prefer and expect even prior to watching, considering and purchasing anything. In other words, customer experience starts way before making content available in multiple markets.

Factors to incorporate in audience profiles (aka personas) include cultural sensitivity, linguistic requirements and preferences, business and individual practices, legal and technical frameworks among other things.

Such profiles are as valuable as stereotypes are useless. So, addressing these dependencies upfront make global brands more impactful, global content more

world ready and global growth more sustainable eventually.

Operationally, the digital globalization journey has to start and be aligned with the strategy you have defined. Here again, it may sound quite obvious but the design, development, certification and deployment of your content may be danger zones for various reasons.

First of all, joint efforts are required from technical and non-technical parties. Although they all aim to reach the same objectives, they may speak a different language (the same words, yet various meanings) and not always feel part of the same full picture. Bridging gaps and establishing sound communication protocols should keep everyone on the right track(s), for instance through regular check points and mutual engagement in a timely fashion.

Secondly, geographically and linguistically dispersed teams are involved more and more frequently in workflows across global organizations. While this distributed model is crucial to balance full centralization or standardization, which will not be a sensible approach in a number of cases, it may also bring up more challenges through virtual collaboration and different languages (different words and various meanings).

Needless to say that centrally managed assets combined with local execution implies tireless communication across borders and boundaries.

Finally, technology is and should remain a business enabler in the interest of interactions between global consumers and your brand. With the offer of tools and services available today, it may be tempting to increase the number of digital channels and properties with added risks of inconsistency, redundancy, maintenance, governance and acceptance internationally.

Financially and commercially, a well-thoughtout globalization approach also generates a number of benefits for your content and your brands. All too often there is not enough

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time or money to do the right thing, but there is always enough of it to do things again.

Therefore, your investment in best practices and global customer experience enablers from the outset will pay off even though it may not look that way at first sight.

Low-hanging fruit will come from cost leadership in global digital operations and content curation as well as from accelerated cycle times and go-to-market accomplishments. On top of these tangible wins, you should add improved customer satisfaction and brand valuation as part of global customer experience which will translate into increased revenues and profitability sooner rather than later.

Some considerations may be worth bearing in mind as lighthouses in your journey to digital globalization. These words of advice may guide you to anticipate major pitfalls, define and refine a realistic roadmap or raise the globalization bar, which will take global customer experience to the next level.

•• Create a holistic globalization picture for your content and your brand: this will enable you to cover all technical and non-technical activities, ensure timely engagement and budgeting and phase your plan accordingly •• Embed globalization in your business plans from the outset: while thinking end-to-end may be less natural considering dependencies of going global, it will avoid a number of corrective and potentially expensive actions at later stages for you and your organization •• Identify a globalization leader and set up a globalization team: in line with a holistic and time-sensitive approach, it will help bridge silos or avoid fragmented management of globalization areas and diluted value across your organization.

Ideally this person will wear the hat of a

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change agent, a global facilitator and an international brand man at the same time •• Drive globalization with your teams and stakeholders first, with processes and tools next: these people will help you make the best decisions in terms of enabling workflows and technology •• Ensure global customer experience is considered as soon as content is created: this experience does not start right when your content and your brand are deployed in international markets. Designing and developing your digital assets with global audiences in mind upfront will save you time and money when you will have to deliver on these assets. It will also offset additional costs coming from your initial internationalization efforts •• Keep in mind that global customer experience goes beyond user experience as it reflects how consumers interact with your products but also with what your company does to turn them into loyal customers through digital channels and properties like support, campaigns or social listening •• Leverage expertise and experience of suppliers or partners who can contribute to an unbiased approach internationally, whether your company has local offices or not •• Optimize costs according to actual globalization requirements: there is a cost of doing the right thing and a cost of not doing it. Some savings will be counterproductive, for instance when not reaching out to global consumers as they expect it or not in a timely fashion. Globalization scorecards and dashboards together with audience profiles will help you maintain cost leadership.

Building Your Business From The Brand Up

Bruno Herrmann Director of Globalization | The Nielsen Company As Director of Globalization, Bruno Herrmann is responsible for global content operations across 6 regions at The Nielsen Company, focusing on global content design and management as well as international customer experience. He joined The Nielsen Company in 2003 to manage international content and digital marketing programs in EMEA prior to leading digital content deployment globally. Previously, he managed online globalization programs at HP and content management initiatives in addition to Web localization at Compaq. Prior to joining Compaq, he worked in the marketing communications and localization industries, taking part in major international projects for high-profile clients.

www.nielsen.com

Ultimately globalization is about speaking the language of your customers and consumers to sell products and develop brands globally.

Their language entails their mother tongue, cultural references, local ecosystem and overall expectations. How you will use that language will make or break the customer experience that you want to strengthen through each digital channel and property.

Centrally managed localization and locally driven execution will contribute to making your globalization balance right.

Synchronizing your global content lifecycle with global product and brand management will help you keep it that way. And you will enable your company to move faster from a global footprint and message to global operations and effectiveness.

Looking To Make An Impact?

Learn how to do it the right way from today’s industry experts.

Visit us today for more on-line articles and magazine back issues. Subscribe for FREE to recieve regular updates on all the latest content and exclusive download access.

www.brandquarterly.comBrand Quarterly

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Don’t Look A Gift Horse In The Mouth Social Data As A Gift To Localised Marketing Katie Rigby-Brown & Brianne Moore | SDL How does a global organisation manage to execute a marketing campaign across 30+ markets while keeping its story in line with the global brand positioning; and retain the message that cultures and distinguishing characteristics of consumers are valued?

Experienced global marketers have been searching for the answer to this challenge for years.

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There is one very important answer: localisation must be prioritised in the global strategy. Time, effort and budget come to mind immediately when thinking of localisation and today timelines and budgets are often shrinking. However, the need to have culturally relevant content and messaging is what drives innovation strategies in today’s global business. It’s the

Building Your Business From The Brand Up

need to find clever, cost-effective ways of speaking many languages, while maintaining one brand message.

Traditionally market researchers have conducted surveys and focus groups to get some level of understanding about how to improve experiences with a brand or advertising material. Researchers would

ask what the imagery of an ad made the viewer feel and receive an answer, “warm and fuzzy�. Unless the business was spending large budgets on observational research, you wouldn’t get the answers to the questions not asked.

Social data provides opportunities to be relevant, before the engagement begins,

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without asking direct questions. For example, a successful video campaign by a large beverage company instigated jokes and discussions about the characters in the video, which reminded younger audiences of their dad or uncle, while the older groups discussed how they had become that character. That campaign has continued to build on that invaluable feedback, driving an online presence and financial growth for specific products.

cases, lacking any kind of return. Although there are a breadth of challenges, most of the difficulties a global brand has in using social data to inform and manage a global marketing strategy fall into three categories: scalability, relevance across business initiatives and measuring effectiveness.

The discussions that people have every day online about a brand, an advertisement, a product, an experience‌ the list goes on, are the largest resource of unsolicited feedback available. These discussions are far beyond Facebook and Twitter, they are in technical forums, blogs, evolving news media, video content, branded properties, everywhere online. No longer is it excusable not to use that resource as an insight for marketing content. It is the gift to marketers from the World Wide Web. Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth.

Automation is king when sorting out scalability using social data, but the Queen also plays a part in driving strategy. There are many tools in the market today that automate the process of collecting social data, analysing it to understand if it’s good or bad, up or down and thematically interesting.

However, those metrics are only providing the opportunity to know what social media content looks like.

Using social data to drive strategy of any kind has proven itself to be daunting and, in many

Achieving Scalability Using Social Data For Insights

One way to tackle this issue is to ensure that you are structuring social data according to the structure of the business. In other words, automating the structure of social data as it is relevant to marketing, the purchase

The Process Of Using Technology And Insights To Evaluate Localisation Priorities And Targeting Content:

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Building Your Business From The Brand Up

experience or product features allows for targeted insights. So, it then makes sense to structure social data according to the journey that consumers take with a brand or product.

Journey mapping is nothing new to business, but using social data to do it is. Data quality is a challenge here and may require some manual work, but the amount of automation to get to that point is necessary if you want to use social in this way.

THERE IS ONLY ONE LANGUAGE...

Using Social Data For Large Business Initiatives In the event that a business is going to enter a new market, it is just as important to understand where to spend budget first as it is to monitor success thereafter. The first can be addressed with social data in a pragmatic way. Simply understand where social conversations are happening around a brand or product and then understand where in the customer journey the competition is falling short with their marketing and delivery in those markets. It’s then up to the business to take care of the last part, taking the insights to develop the strategy. The figure below shows the level of automation that we have today to take care that each of these steps can be implemented correctly so that scalable insights are gained. Because social is such an agile set of data, the right methodology and degree of automation overcomes the issue of how much time traditional market research methods take to understand markets.

Social Data As A Measurement That Allows The Business To Course Correct, In Time, Not With Hindsight Finally, ongoing measurement using social data has turned into a major point of contention for business. Reports that tell you fluctuation in sentiment or influencers only indicate whether you are thumbs up or down

Your success as a global brand relies on communicating across cultures with a customer experience that’s delivered anytime, anywhere... and in the right language.

In today’s multicultural, mobile and digitallyempowered society, a comprehensive translation and localization strategy can drive both international business expansion and engagement in your domestic markets.

But all too often, language is an after-thought, leaving marketers at the mercy of ad hoc approaches or lastminute fixes.

It’s time to change all that. You need to take off the blinkers, make your translation and localization strategy a top priority and accept that in order to reach international audiences there is only one language that matters... the customer’s language.

There are countless opportunities to expand your business globally and making the language and cultural connection is a critical first step.

Learn how to create a brand experience customers can relate to. Visit www.sdl.com/fivetruths-language

Please come and meet the SDL team at the Brand2Global conference – Booth #6

Brianne Moore Business Solutions, Customer Experience Management | SDL Brianne is a business consultant with a focus in market research design and implementation. An experienced practitioner – with a unique skill set in social media analysis – she has clients in a wide range of industries and is focused on innovation in research methodology, specifically leveraging SDL CXM technologies as research instruments to understand global markets and provide solutions to enterprise organisations.

Using intelligence from social media to inform business solutions requires rigour and a strong methodology. She works with businesses to ensure that the methodology is appropriately designed to the needs of the business, the audience and market.

www.sdl.com

on the day. True insight lies in understanding if consumers are being moved along their own customer journey and if they are, how successful those experiences have been.

Once social data has been used to gather insights, the technology used to automate that and the familiarity of analysts to that data allows for close monitoring of the business objectives by measuring and scrutinizing the right elements of the initiative.

In the event that a campaign highly offends the Chinese market, because one detail was missed, a scoring system is necessary to see the first moment the score that sits behind the Awareness phase of the customer journey drops.

For example, a car manufacturer devises a campaign to show how hard working people deserve to drive the brand, but not all cultures are hard working. The suggestion that a

culture is not hard working drives a negative response to the ad, but this is not shown as a negative sentiment, it is shown as Awareness and Connection with the brand turning downward in certain markets. This will help the business to know almost instantly that it was an ad campaign, not a recall issue that is creating the impact.

If managed and implemented effectively throughout the business, not just in social media teams, social data can be the core as well as the peripheral of the global insights approach. It won’t be all-encompassing, but using social data effectively allows for budgets directed in scalable and efficient ways. So, thanks to the cultural revolution of the internet and the intersection of it and culture, we have a prize winning horse.

Katie Rigby-Brown Business Development | SDL Katie Rigby-Brown is a localization expert with over 7 years’ experience of assisting organizations to provide localized and culturally aware customer experiences in local markets. With a linguistic degree and a passion for technology, Katie has successfully worked with Fortune 100 businesses across Europe, the US and the Middle East. In key positions across strategic account management, new business development and regional management roles, Katie uses her expertise of SDL’s technology and services to help brands to predict what their customers want and engage with them across multiple languages, cultures, channels and devices.

www.sdl.com 24

Building Your Business From The Brand Up

Behind The Curtain Brand Quarterly Talks With Brand2Global Founder Ulrich Henes

BQ And that passion has also seen you become involved in not-for-profit work.

We recently had the opportunity to have a ‘virtual’ sit-down with Ulrich Henes, the founder of the Brand2Global conference.

Ulrich Yes, about four years ago I was approached by and joined a small organization called Translators Without Borders, which is following the same principles as the other ‘Without Borders’ organizations such as Doctors Without Borders.

Read on to discover what makes him tick; and of course, find answers to the all important questions: •• What is Brand2Global?

•• Why is it here?

•• Is it for you?

BQ In addition to founding the Brand2Global Conference, you’re also involved in the Localization World Conference and The Localization Institute. It’s clear you’ve got a real passion for all things ‘Glocal’. When did you first catch that bug?

Ulrich All the way back in high school, or gymnasium as we call it in Germany, I was always fascinated with international affairs, international business affairs. So this has really been a lifelong passion.

We offer free translations by qualified translators, to non-profit organizations around the globe. We have been able to really scale up the organization recently - translating tens of thousands of free words a month.

We have also become involved in a very exciting new project, where we are the language link between various international help organizations. There are people who are experts in building relief shelters; there are people who provide medical care. What has been missing all these years, is people who know how to professionally manage the language needs that come with these efforts.

BQ That’s definitely something that will make a real difference.

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Something else you must be really proud of is the recently completed 25th Localization World Conference, with a record-setting 650 attendees. What would you say is the main reason for it’s long-term success?

Ulrich I think the need for localization expertise, which is the adaptation of products and services for global or international markets is growing.

It’s become an accepted standard practice that new companies need to look at the global opportunities right away, and we have been providing a place to do that. It helps also that we hold it in Europe, Asia and North America, so we can tailor the needs to those continents.

It’s been a rewarding journey since we launched the event. What I find fascinating is that we used to attract mainly an IT crowd; the Google’s, the Microsoft’s, the Apple’s, the Oracle’s - it is now becoming very diverse with global hotel chains, airlines, carmanufacturers, motorcycle manufacturers like Harley Davidson attending to learn the ins and outs of cultural diversity, language diversity, legal differences, cultural differences and so on.

BQ That really shows how industries are changing in order to succeed through global expansion.

Speaking of success - How do you go about ‘translating’ Localization World’s success through to the Brand2Global Conference?

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Ulrich Some of the things we can duplicate in terms of format. We also bring our expertise in the cultural adaptation required to produce 25 events in different places around the globe.

There is some crossover but as we have experienced, we can’t really offer a huge program on global marketing topics with Localization World, as when we promote the event most marketing people don’t ‘connect’ with localization. However when we produce a Brand2Global event, it is much clearer and it also allows us to focus purely on global branding, global social media and so on.

BQ It sounds like it’s a lot more targeted so marketers and people involved with branding are going to get full benefit from the program.

Ulrich Yes, in fact, already in the two years or so we have been involved in organizing the Brand2Global event, I am sometimes reminded of the early days of Localization World where localization was not that understood in many companies - Harley Davidson for example.

When Harley Davidson started attending Localization World, it was the documentation manager who came. But by attending Localization World he came to the realization that Harley Davidson needed to approach this whole issue of global business quite differently. He proposed to the board creating a new department. He then ended up hiring a replacement to manage documentation, and he took charge of their globalization effort.

Building Your Business From The Brand Up

Ulrich Henes (right) enjoying last years inagural event with Romek Jansen of BrandMaker

A majority of companies - even large 50 billion-dollar brands, have not yet figured out many of the global marketing pieces. One of the challenges is that it is a moving target so whatever was a valid approach two years ago, might be far less valid today.

It’s easy to talk about your successes, but being willing to own up your failures, that requires the right kind of atmosphere and I consider myself to have developed some really good skills in creating an atmosphere where people feel comfortable for that kind of open sharing.

BQ Last year was Brand2Global’s inaugural conference; what’s your favorite memory?

I also liked the couple of really interesting presentations I managed to make it to.

Unfortunately, even as the organizer - in a conference with four tracks as we had last year, I still haven’t figured out a way to attend every single session.

Ulrich My favorite memory was the overall friendliness.

One thing that is important and is my baseline when I produce events is that I want to create an open, transparent atmosphere where practitioners can come together and feel comfortable sharing experiences, good and bad.

Some of the high points for me were the presentation by KLM about their global web presence; there was one from Royal Caribbean about localizing videos or adapting videos about shore visits in multiple languages and how that increased the sales of these.

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The other one that was really fascinating was a person from Havas Media who had done a long-term study about sustainable brands, finding that it makes a difference long-term how companies’ stock values do

uestion Time:

What’s the biggest mindshift between a local and global marketing focus?

The biggest challenge for brands is adapting for local culture whilst maintaining a global consistency.

So often language is the focus, yet words alone are not enough. The great orators understand it is often how words are phrased that makes the difference. This is true when localizing content too with cultural context. Culture is defined by so much more than language alone. Common history, customs, arts and even humour all play into an individual’s interpretation of content.

This is especially important in the age of social media. Where local misunderstanding can be amplified, quickly. Showing a lack of cultural sensitivity and awareness that can remain with audiences for a long time. This means localized campaigns must rely on more than machine translation of the words, and begin to bring greater focus on human interpretation of what they mean to each community involved.

Dean Russell EMEA Digital Marketing Director LEWIS PR

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if the company’s products and services are perceived as doing good.

Then one that I chaired, I found fascinating was global marketing strategies from Cisco, the internet hardware giant. Outlining in great detail, how they developed a global marketing plan. How to decide which product to promote; in which countries; by which method - traditional print ad, social media, through a website, through events.

It’s an incredible task for a company that is in 80-90 countries and of course you have a limited budget. You also have an incredible number of products that are competing in some countries with local products. So that needs to be taken into consideration - in China you might be competing with Huawei, in Germany you might be competing with Siemens or someone.

So those stand out for me.

BQ I can see why you would want to turn superhuman in order to see them all.

What would you say is your long-term vision for the Brand2Global Conference?

Ulrich We hope to continue building on the success of the first by making it larger. We are also making an attempt to bring in the academic community more. There is one academic conference out there however the problem for academics, as I have been told, is that business doesn’t often pay much attention to the research they do. So there are some valuable insights from some leading business professors that are not getting attention from the people they had hoped.

So part of our game-plan is, that possibly next year, we may have a pre-conference day that is a mainly for academics - for global business professors, global marketing professors. We had quite a few already at

last year’s conference and will have more this year, but at this stage they are embedded in the main conference.

We hope that they would then stay for the conference so that they can interact with the people from Cisco and KLM - and that can be a fruitful collaboration between the actual doers and the researchers and the analysts.

Another major part of our vision is that we held the first one in London, the second one in London too, but for 2015 we are looking at adding another location. Possibly Asia or North America. So long-term, we hope to emulate Localization World, which is being held on three continents. We hope to have in the next two to four years, a European Brand2Global, an Asian Brand2Global and a North American Brand2Global.

BQ There are a multitude of different marketing conferences every year. In your mind, what would you say is the biggest difference between Brand2Global and the other marketing conferences?

Ulrich It’s simple - the focus on ‘Global’. There is - as far as I know - no other purely ‘global marketing’ conference.

We screen every idea - every presentation idea that comes to us. Is this really about global marketing and if someone would, for example, want to present a very clever marketing campaign that was done in the UK or in Germany, we would likely not accept it because it is not about global marketing.

Now, if that person would come and say “Here is the campaign we did to introduce this new product line and we ran it in Germany ‘and’ France ‘and’ in Italy ‘and’ the UK ‘and’ Sweden and I would like to show you how we dealt with these cultural language differences what we retained from country to country where we added a local component to make

it more appealing to the local” - that’s the kind of presentations that we look for.

So we don’t try to be - I would say a ‘marketing’ conference per se.

We are a ‘global marketing’ conference.

BQ So who would you say then, should attend Brand2Global 2014?

Ulrich As far as job titles are concerned, it is a little tricky because from large companies, we are more likely to get people from different levels, as we target both in our programming. We have a Strategic Track so this will be with a higher-level responsibility - CMOs and people who have large-scale efforts. Then we have paired this with the Tactical Track where we talk more of the actual implementation of some of these strategies.

We might have a strategic session on global web presence and in the tactical track, there might be a session that actually tells you in detail, what that means, what tools to use, the choices in tools that are there in software as a way to manage a multilingual presence - all that kind of stuff.

Brand2Global is for anyone who has responsibilities for global marketing currently and people who realize the path that their company is on - will require that expertise.

This is a great opportunity not to have to learn by trial and error. Here you can come and learn best practices - what others have found out works and doesn’t work. There will still be plenty of trial and error left because every company, every product line is different and what might have worked for a KLM in Japan, might not work for a hardware manufacturer or a motorcycle manufacturer. But still, this is an incredible opportunity for people with those responsibilities.

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Sailing The Seas Of Social Media…

Lars Silberbauer | Lego

There are two ways of doing marketing, the traditional way and the social way. The traditional way can be compared to launching a rocket ship where social media marketing is more comparable to negotiating the wind in with a sailboat.

In traditional marketing you plan and estimate and in the end you push the launch button, keeping you fingers crossed, hoping that the rocket will land in the right place. Social media marketing is totally different from the ‘fire-and-forget’ world of campaign marketing.

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Social media is an environment where the only constant is that the pace of change, and the number of factors that are changing, are ever increasing. Nobody questions the power of the wind and waves at sea, and nobody should enter the world of social media without accepting these core conditions: Only a fool doesn’t fear the sea, or at least respect its unpredictability.

Building Your Business From The Brand Up

Here’s my view on some of the existing perceptions about marketing that you might want to re-consider.

Risk A lot of companies think that taking no action equals not taking on any risks – but on social media, the act of doing nothing equals stopping steering the boat and letting the currents drag you wherever they want. At some point you’ll meet a reef and then it’s too late to start building a rudder.

When a brand perceives risk as something that can be mitigated by test and analysis (and worst of all: politics, compromises and internal consensus), the problem is two-fold.

Doing too much testing and evaluation means building up risk by the shear amount of time and resources being spend on the test phase.

Time and resources that you can’t spend in the field; influencing consumers, building relationships and learning from your actions.

Let’s face it, our notion of ‘risk’ was born in a world with different constraints and it doesn’t apply in the same way to the world of social media: Risk can be mitigated by not doing anything in the same way stopping swimming will save you from drowning.

Its 2014 and radical changes in consumer behavior have pushed brands out to sea.

It’s not up to you to decide if you want to be there, and it hasn’t been your choice for a quite a while.

The only question that brands should ask themselves is: How are we going to deal with it and which of the many accepted ‘truths’ about marketing do we need to question, to quickly shift the organization to a new understanding of consumer engagement and communication?

Remember: On social media, your risks are quite low at the beginning: There’s little or no initial spending, you can build on scalable 3rd party platforms and try out a lot of stuff in real life without spending half of your analysis budget doing it. Compared to planning, executing and placing conventional media, the cost of trial and error on social channels is almost non-existent.

Imagine yourself a sailor preparing for a race: You want to get out there to test your skills and your hardware. The sooner you get moving, the more you learn. You don’t learn how to sail by talking about it.

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Lars Silberbauer Andersen Global Director of Social Media & Search | Lego Lars is Global Director of social media & Search at LEGO and is driving the well known and innovative toy company’s social media strategy and execution. He leads a global team that drives real time engagement with consumers world wide as well as the company’s search strategy, the recently launched LEGO TV and Youtube channel. Previously he worked for 10 years in the digital and broadcast media industry as digital strategist and later creative manager driving digital strategy and leading project development for Danish Broadcasting Corporation. He has also worked in the US, driving web development and user research. He holds and MA in Digital Media Science and a HD in Innovation and Organizational Strategy.

www.lego.com

The Campaign As long as there are products to market there will be campaigns. That is a perfectly valid statement, but the problem is that some marketers also deduct from this statement that all marketing equals doing campaigns!

From the first day at business school, every marketer is taught to adopt a discourse focused solely around the Campaign with a capital C. We’ve developed a whole industry around the Campaign, lauding and awarding the best Campaigns while ignoring most noncampaign marketing efforts.

The Campaign metaphor is absolutely useless for social engagement because it’s signals the complete opposite of what social media is all about.

The word Campaign originally meant a connected series of military operations forming a distinct phase of a war. So basically it’s an army term, it’s about taking over something by force, beating the opposition. Campaigning is a one way, short term, high investment, winner takes it all-action.

Social Media, on the other hand, is about creating connections, building long term relationships, and it’s all about patience and understanding. As a social media marketer you’re in it for the long run, keeping your reach and engagement growing.

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We don’t want to take over anything, we want people to trust us and to decide to invest in us, to invest their attention and time, their creative skills and hopefully, at some point down the line invest in our products.

Paid Media Let’s revisit the rocket metaphor: I like to compare paid media and traditional campaign planning to launching a rocket into space. The core message (typically a TV commercial) can be compared to the crew module, which is then fueled by giant booster rockets - which basically is the paid media.

Prior to the launch you do a lot of calculations and test your flight path and make sure that everything is correct – then you await perfect conditions before you push the launch button.

Traditional campaigns and paid media work the same way, you test and you analyze and you try to predict what is going to happen – because when the plan is executed, you can only do minor corrections and the investment is so big that you’ve only got one shot at it.

But rocket fuel and sailboats don’t mix.

Fortunately we have the benefit of not having huge startup costs and the benefit of actually knowing if we are on course before be turn on the boosters.

Paid media is a great support to social media engagement, but it should always be directly controlled by the social media crew.

Building Your Business From The Brand Up

This clearly goes against the traditional separation between content development and media buying that an industry based on TV advertising has created.

The problem is, that if you don’t have the right understanding about what drives the engagement you’ll end up driving the wrong parts of the engagement at the wrong time and in the wrong direction. And in social media you also have a lot of stats that can help you out, but only bringing in the human element lets you really understand social media.

So in a world where paid, owned and earned media have converged, you need people in the front line that are able to understand and execute immediately across these three areas as if they were a crew on a sail boat.

Radical changes in consumer behavior must lead to radical changes in the way that we understand and perceive marketing and the understanding of risk, campaigning and paid media.

A lot of companies are out there, getting their feet wet – but in my mind we have so far only seen the very early beginnings. A whole industry has been built on creating TV advertising. The rocket-ship way of working is deeply rooted into the business models on both agency and client side, into our work processes and into our pre-supposed assumptions and discourse.

We need to go through the painstaking process of questioning the fundamental taken-for-granted truths of marketing before we really are reading to embrace a new environment and sail the seas of social media.

START: MARCH 2015

An enlightening trip into your digital future check-in at www.digitalbrandmanagement.info

Los Angeles (USA) Berlin/St.Gallen (Germany/Switzerland) São Paulo (Brazil) Shanghai (China)

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Building Your Business From The Brand Up

Global Brand Management Is The Management Of Feedback

Prof. Dr. Dieter Georg Herbst | source1 networks A look at any newspaper, magazine or television programming gives the impression that the world has become a village with a population of like individuals. Differences have disappeared and the ones that still exist, won’t for much longer. The world as a village?

The impression of assimilation only increases when we consider Chinese youths who dress in western fashions, eat western foods and listen to western music. Here in the western world, we eat pot stickers, consult feng shui experts and attend the Beijing Opera.

Yet who would contend about themselves that they had oriented their values, their thoughts, their feelings and their behavior on an Asian culture? A deeper study shows rather quickly how locally rooted culture around the world is. Why are there national editions of the Financial Times, National Geographic and CNN? Of MTV and even Sesame Street?

In a Nike spot, U.S. basketball star LeBron James out-dribbles a Kung Fu master and several dragons. The Chinese departments for radio, film and television banned the commercial because of their perceived offense to national dignity. Indignation too, that a black beat a white.

Car manufacturer BMW wanted to import its European “Driving Force” campaign to China.

The campaign flopped. Reason: the ads depicted people sweating. Not something you can sell cars to the Chinese upper classes with. Chinese are among a group

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with the least active sweat glands. They are unfamiliar with arm pit odor and proud of it.

Even with an apparently global product as the hamburger, burger chains orient themselves according to local food habits: burgers don’t have cheese in Israel because kosher restaurants keep meat and milk apart.

Burgers in India are prepared with vegetables or mutton since Hindus are forbidden beef. In Muslim countries, restaurants aren’t allowed to serve pork – there, McDonald’s was forced to apologize for the taste of beef and pork in its french fries. The Japanese eat their burgers with a knife and fork. Whereas they must eat other foods with their hands for religious reasons, for example rice balls and raw fish.

Isolated instances? Or are cultural differences critical to the design of global brand management? If they are, what are the tasks put before brand managers?

The Example Of Culture Codes Culture codes have to do with values, norms and the basic givens of a country. They influence the thought, feeling and behavior of people. Example - Chocolate: chocolate consumption can be segmented around the world according to taste preferences and when it is given as a gift. In software for the Islamic market, crosses are prohibited. In Russia, red flags. Ivana Modena in her 2005 book Global Markets and Local Structures: “Software companies with ambitions which cross borders put in up to 20 times as much work into internationalizing and localizing their programs as they do into the actual software development.”

Because of such differences, companies have markedly changed their approach to global brand management in recent years: following years of hoped-for success via standardization, strategies are becoming increasingly differentiated. Particularities in local markets led Coca-Cola, since 2001 36

and despite high costs, to include 100 local variations of its commercials. The spots were created in 14 countries and were shown in 200. The VW Golf used to be called the Rabbit in the U.S. and was later renamed Golf.

While the car was still called Rabbit, VW sold 250,000 units a year. As the Golf, sales sank to 30,000 units. The Golf went back to being the Rabbit and sales doubled within a year.

People think, feel and behave on the basis of mostly unconscious, culturally-learned meanings, so called codes (Rapaille 2006).

Codes are also referred to as cues (Laibson 2011). The internationally renowned cultural researcher Clotaire Raipaille writes in his book The Culture Code that a culture code is the meaning we unconsciously ascribe to something along the path of the culture in which we grow up – a car, a particular kind of food, a relationship and even a country.

The French adore their cheese. They keep it under a special dome for covering cheese in order that it can breathe at room temperature and ripen properly. The code for cheese in France is life. In the U.S. cheese is pasteurized, wrapped in plastic and stored in the refrigerator like a mummy. The code for cheese in the U.S. is death. Such codes can differ from one another within a country as the example of India illustrates.

Example - Food: people develop preferences for certain tastes and aversions to others within a cultural context. The culture around food is a decisive factor as well as the flavor patterns of regional or national cuisines. So it makes sense that, while one food might be valued highly in one culture, it is disliked in another. The palette that is shaped in an individual’s childhood strongly affects later preferences; it can be tied to familiar and societal security and a connection to a certain group. In the end, everything harkens back to the world in which we grew up.

There are of course certain codes that can be applied globally because everyone understands their meanings: BMW compared

Building Your Business From The Brand Up

a new model with the body parts of animals.

O2 uses oxygen as a symbol in various countries. A pharmaceutical company depicted the elapsed fiscal year with hands, strategy manuals utilize ‘the earth’ worldwide as a metaphor for commerce. Codes which are cross-cultural include the following: •• Basic elements: earth, wind & fire •• People: hands, basic emotions, etc.

•• Caricatures, sketches, comic figures •• Nature •• Sports Core to effective global brand management is uncovering such codes and developing an internal way of working with them.

The Management Of Feedback When experts are asked what characterizes global brand management, they cite its enormous complexity, its high risk and its higher reconnaissance requirements.

National brand management is also labor intensive, full of risk and complex, however. What then characterizes global brand management that national brand management lacks? Answer: global brand management must manage feedback.

Every country could basically shape its own discrete brand management as called for in the particular country. But what happens when a country plans something that affects another country or the central strategy, or that ‘could’ possibly affect it? In such an event, the brand management should be marshaled; content, timing and format should be set up free of contradictions in order to leverage commonalities and avoid cross talk and unintended messaging.

An example: in these internet times, users check worldwide where they can get the best price on a product; search engines and service provider that compare prices. If a company offers its products at different prices in different countries, it should be coordinated. Global brand management is the management of feedback.

Expert, global brand management is tied to organizational prerequisites: they affect the participating personnel, roles and responsibilities, processes, the applied information technology as well as the communication structure. Because the discussion among relevant groups in different countries directly affects corporate politics, global brand management must be championed by corporate leadership, funded by a discreet budget and supported with clear directives.

What does that mean?

Prof. Dr. Dieter Georg Herbst CEO | source1 networks Professor Herbst has been an executive partner in source1 networks GmbH since 1999 and advises companies all over the world. He is Honorary Professor of Strategic Communications Management at the Berlin Academy of Arts (Germany), Senior Lecturer for Corporate Communication and Social Media at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland), Visiting Professor at Antai College of Economics & Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (China), Lecturer L’Ecole de Design de Nantes Atlantiques @ Srishti School of Art, Design & Technology in Bangalore (India). He is member of the “Internet Sages” and was elected Germanys “Professor of the Year” in 2011.

www.source1.de

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Shifting From Marketing To Consumers - To Mattering To People: A Strategy To Align Global Brands With 21St Century People In All Markets Sharon Johnson | RE:PURPOSE & Kate Cox | Havas Media Today’s marketing leaders are incentivized to seek the economies of globalized branding strategies. Global unity requires compromise, collaboration and a type of participative decision making that seems to run counter to marketing to the always-on ‘consumer’,

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driving an insatiable need for marketing with speed, authenticity and scale.

Whilst many global consumer companies have decentralized marketing accountabilities, the pressure on marketing spend, the

Building Your Business From The Brand Up

1. Offer People Radical, GameChanging Benefits To Their Quality Of Life.

People don’t just want better products and services: they want better lives. Havas Media has conducted a companion study to the UN Global Compact-Accenture authoritative CEO study on sustainability. We surveyed 30,000 people across 20 countries.

In emerging markets – where most global brands are seeking substantial growth – people are optimistic about the future, they anticipate marked improvement to their quality of life and they’re highly engaged with brands. In developed markets – where global brands seek to sustain a large part of their sales – people are largely negative in their outlook for the future and anticipate negative impacts on their quality of life.

Whether optimistic or negative, people globally expect brands to help them attain the best possible future. In fact, globally people think brands are as responsible as governments for improving our lives – a metric that has increased by 15% in the past 2 years alone. Yet our study showed that whilst brands are performing broadly on traditional factors of price, quality and being ‘innovative’, marketers are under-performing in driving home 6 of the top 10 factors people nominated as influential to their purchasing. proliferation of digital channels and the organic spread of content creates the perfect conditions to unify the central premise: the brand Purpose. Here are three incredibly simple, yet fundamentally large shifts to help global brands to win in local markets.

These un-met needs include benefits to personal health, life satisfaction, and helping people consume in ways that are better for the environment. So instead of focusing only on new product features, price or value for money, brands can win across markets by relating their Purpose to people’s quality of life.

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uestion Time:

Why is it important for Global Marketers to be continually learning and developing?

The "information superhighway" has turned supersonic since the phrase was coined in the 1990s. And the ways that consumers buy, research and communicate are changing and diversifying at the same supersonic rate.

There is only one way to keep up with this accelerating pace of change in both technology and consumer habits. That is to keep learning. Learning from leaders in the global marketing industry, from case studies and from each other's triumphs and mistakes.

The need to be agile, and to develop the ability to switch from one channel to another, holds true for anyone involved with marketing and communication, even at a local level. Global marketers have a special challenge, in that consumer habits are changing at different rates and in different ways across the world.

So for global marketers, it's even more essential to keep reading, posting, sharing, searching and listening – preferably in more than one language. Stay relevant, reactive and proactive.

If you don't keep learning, you'll not only lose your edge in a highly competitive field – you'll be left on the hard shoulder of that information superhighway, wondering what to do with no GPS and only an old flip phone.

Eric Ingrand VP of Content Marketing, EMEA EnVeritas Group

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2. Honestly, Transparently And Authentically Demonstrate Purpose Beyond Profit.

The Millennial generation, now economically active, is shaping a new, emerging consciousness of how we spend, not just what we spend our money on. In short, people think companies should help us buy into a better work and are targeting their daily spending to shape the world they want to live in.

Today most brands CSR or sustainability exists largely in an organisational silo, disparate from brand marketing, with a few notable exceptions. The expanding need for honesty and transparency is fuelled by technology and the social spread of content through multiple channels, without brand’s intervention. The new ‘honesty’ is a holistic programme of communication, well beyond the abstract metrics of sustainability reporting.

Across our global study sample, a top 5 or top 10 challenge in every country surveyed is ‘ending corruption’. The starkest finding is that ending corruption is an issue people believe business should address. For example in the UK, ending corruption ranks third, after creating jobs and economic growth, as an issue business should address.

Decades of greenwashing has culminated in unprecedented distrust. Yet there is hopefulness and brands that enable their consumers to contribute to improving their lives, their communities and society’s problems are winning. In fact the pathway to realize brand preference lies in radical transparency on the impact brands make and those they enable. From Nigeria to Germany, motivators to choose one brand over another include ‘being aware of its positive social impact’ and ‘letting me take part in causes’.

Sharon Johnson CEO | RE:PURPOSE Sharon is co-founder and CEO of RE:PURPOSE, the dedicated social business consultancy in the Havas Media Group, dedicated to building the most Meaningful Brands™. Shaped by working in her native South Africa on the ANC’s first election campaign and the launch of mobile phones in Africa, she naturally gravitated to innovative initiatives to further sustainable development. Sharon has lived and worked in Africa, Australia and the UK, consulting to a range of FTSE 500 leaders on sustainability engagement and marketing strategies, as well as performing artists, philanthropists, UN agencies and Foundations interested in fuelling people-powered movements

http://repurposebiz.com

3. Stop Marketing To Consumers, Start Mattering To People.

Fundamentally, seeking a price premium for being more purposeful is a flawed strategy.

So is leveraging charity relationships to stimulate short term purchasing: it’s just short-termism in a new dressing. Our study found the majority of people won’t pay more for ‘better’ products and services – and why should they pay for brands to do the right thing?

And across the 20 countries surveyed, people think it’s good for business to give to charity, but it’s not a motivator to brand preference or purchase. Latin America is the outlier, where supporting charity ranks higher at 16 out of 25 possible purchase motivators.

People want more for their lives and they want business to help them get there. They’re aware of the challenges we face globally and they seek brands that offer meaningful benefits to them, to society and to the world.

This is the most empowered generation ever.

And brands that offer meaning – not utopia, just authenticity and purpose – can win.

For example 90% of working Chinese mothers – a segment the size of the US population – will actively recommend brands to friends, family and colleagues when they are aware of its positive social impact. Since a vast majority of these women post on micro-blogs, this amounts to organic marketing for a brand that money can’t buy.

The business case for purpose is simple: People are twice as likely to choose a more responsible brand over its competitors when all else is equal. More than half of people globally – rising to 78% in Latin America – say they are loyal to brands whose purpose beyond profit is clear and credible. And people are up to seven times more likely to recommend brands to others when they are aware of its positive impact on making our lives more meaningful.

Kate Cox Managing Partner, Strategy and Ideas | Havas Media Kate is Managing Partner, Strategy and Ideas for Havas Media London. Kate’s role also includes getting under the skin of all new communication channels, ideas and opportunities and working out ways of understanding their effectiveness for Havas Media’s clients.

Kate works on Havas Media’s global Meaning Brands for a Sustainable Future project – developing new measures of brand equity and strategy for clients. In 2011 she co-authored a report for the UK’s Institute of Practitioners of Advertising, ‘New Models of Marketing Effectiveness – From Integration to Orchestration’ – looking at new channel planning models.

www.havasmedia.com

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Getting Beyond the Hype: How To Use Mobile To Grow Your Global Business Jamie Turner | 60 Second Communications Not long ago, a study by the 60 Second Marketer found that, on a global basis, there were more mobile phone owners than there were toothbrush owners. That may be hard to believe, but it’s true. Equally surprising is the fact that in many Western European countries, the index for mobile phone 42

subscriptions exceeds 100. In other words, for every 100 people in those countries, there are 100+ mobile phone subscriptions.

In the end, whether you live in Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro, Sydney or anywhere else around the globe, mobile is a part of your life and will

Building Your Business From The Brand Up

Wrapping Your Mind Around Mobile Learning how to leverage mobile for your business is not difficult because there are only seven primary platforms you’ll need to be familiar with. Here’s a quick rundown of each: Mobile Websites: This is a simplified and streamlined version of your desktop website that’s been designed to appeal to a mobile visitor who is using their smartphone or a tablet to connect with your brand.

SMS and MMS: Short Message Service and Multimedia Message Service are systems that enable brands to send texts or rich media (graphics, video, audio) to prospects and customers.

Mobile Apps: Not to be confused with mobile websites, these mini-software programs reside in the smartphone or tablet and can be used by brands to provide information or e-commerce with prospects or customers.

QR Codes: QR codes wont be around forever.

For the time being, they’re a viable way to engage customers and drive them to your mobile website.

Mobile Display Ads: These are also known as mobile banner ads and are also an effective way to drive new prospects to a mobile website. You can also use “click-to-call” mobile display ads, which make it easy for prospects to call your business with the push of a button.

remain so for a long time to come. So, as a member of the global business community, the question becomes not whether you should use mobile to grow sales and revenues, but how you should use mobile to grow your sales and revenues.

Mobile Paid Search: Identical to desktop paid search except for the fact that it’s customized for mobile. The largest and best-known players in this field are Google and Bing in the Western Hemisphere and Baidu in China and Asia.

Location-Based Services (LBM): This includes services such as foursquare, SCVNGR and Yelp, all of which can be leveraged by global companies to drive traffic to their locations. LBS service revenues in the EU 27+2 reached an estimated € 735

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million and are forecasted to grow to € 2.3 billion by 2018. In North America, revenues are forecasted to grow from almost US$ 1.8 billion in 2013 to nearly US$ 3.8 billion by 2018.

How To Get Started In Mobile Marketing Many businesses believe that building a mobile app is the first thing they should do to launch their mobile campaigns, but that’s not actually the case. The first step is to make sure your website is optimized for mobile. In most cases, that means using responsive design to re-format your website content so that it’s easily-readable on a smartphone.

The odds are pretty good that your website is already optimized for mobile, so the next step is to investigate mobile paid search and/ or mobile display. These two tactics are easy to execute and can be used on both a global and a local basis. Most global businesses will want to work with their ad agency or marketing communications firm to develop a mobile paid search or display campaign, but if you’re a do-it-yourselfer or have an internal agency, reach out to Google or Bing for the paid search portion and to a mobile ad network for the mobile display.

If you’re going to dive into mobile display, you’ll want to take advantage of its powerful

targeting capabilities. Are you interested in only reaching business travelers while they’re in airports waiting for their next flight? No problem. How about reaching people who are walking within a 50-meter radius of one of your retail locations. Again, no problem. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Targeting with mobile display is where the revolution is happening and it’s a great place to kick-start your global mobile advertising campaign.

Once you’ve got a mobile website and you’ve launched a mobile paid search and display campaign, you can start looking into other tactics such as app development, SMS, QR codes and location based services. Each of these tactics has their strengths and weaknesses – for example, apps are best used to reduce customer churn, not for customer acquisition – but a well-rounded mobile marketing campaign will likely use elements of each tool and technique.

In the end, as someone interested in building a global business or a global brand, there’s only one thing to remember – despite our different cultures and nationalities, we still all have one thing in common: we’re all human. And human beings behave the same way when it comes to the brands they love.

They start by being interested in a brand, then desiring a brand, then taking action to purchase the brand. And mobile is the perfect tool to facilitate that process.

Jamie Turner CEO | 60 Second Communications Jamie is the CEO of 60 Second Communications, a full-service marketing agency working with The Coca-Cola Company, InterContinental Hotels Group, Samsung and others.

He is a regular guest on CNN and HLN on the topics of social media, mobile marketing and branding. He is also the co-author of How to Make Money with Social Media and Go Mobile.

In addition to the 60 Second Marketer blog, Jamie writes for Mashable, HubSpot and Social Media Examiner. He has been profiled in the world’s best-selling marketing textbook and is an internationally-recognized keynote speaker at trade shows, events and corporations around the globe.

www.60secondcommunications.com 44

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Susie Hamlin Director Of Global Strategy And Advocacy | Cisco Fiona Vesey | Vesey Creative

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It was my pleasure to recently spend some time talking with Susie Hamlin, Cisco’s Director of Global Strategy and Advocacy.

As the leader of the team responsible for gathering global insights and ensuring the ‘one voice’ messaging of Cisco’s advertising, brand and digital efforts across the globe, it

Building Your Business From The Brand Up

was a wonderful opportunity to pick her brain and learn from her experience.

Thanks Susie, not only for sharing your valuable insights with our Brand Quarterly readers but also for your time - as a brand new mom we appreciate you’re now busier than ever!

Fiona That they relate to…

Susie That they can relate to, exactly.

Fiona Susie, you started at Cisco in the late 90s.

Looking back over those 15 or so years - do you feel that global marketing has become easier or even more complex?

Susie You know, I think it really depends on the kind of campaign that we are doing.

I think that it is a lot easier for us to adapt product campaign messaging. It’s very direct and straightforward. As we work with brand messaging it becomes more cultural, whether it’s imagery or messaging, it definitely poses more of a challenge. We have been challenged in determining the best model for campaign creation. We have had a balance of efforts being done centrally, and others done completely in country.

There are pros and cons to both of those, and I think that the most important thing – and it continues to be a bit of a challenge - is when you start talking about a visionary message or ‘advancement’. We can talk about these areas more easily in our mature markets because we have the big research companies, IDC and IDG communicating on the topics that we are presenting. When you start bringing a visionary message into places like Brazil, China or India you have to remember that the market readiness may not be at the same point.

We want to make sure that we are leading with visionary messages in the US, UK and our other mature markets but we have to keep in mind that in order for it to be credible in

our more emerging markets, there has to be some local relevancy. It must be something that demonstrates a relevant example of how the vision can be delivered.

Fiona That makes complete sense. So when it comes to maintaining your brand voice, while making yourself relevant in these different markets, what would you say is the key to success?

Susie I think on the voice perspective - We also deal with some cultural aspects there as far as professional tone. The most important thing is that we are a technology company but we try to remain human. This voice and tone really does represent the company.

Our corporate social responsibility activities actually back up these messages in various countries. It’s not just being consistent in how you execute, but also in the voice that you are using. We want to be seen as open, not arrogant - very human and friendly.

Fiona Just as important as brand voice, is visual identity. How do you go about maintaining a high standard of visual consistency globally with the Cisco brand?

Susie We actually have a - I would call it, a pretty advanced identity system that the brand strategy team works on. We have color pallets, imagery, iconography and various elements that are used in case studies, consistent templates and PowerPoint

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presentations. When we move into campaign execution that’s when we start to nuance the visuals a little bit.

countries are the most important to customize your marketing for?

We have run into some interesting challenges as we have included animals in some of our spots. The clearance factor in several countries has been extremely difficult. We have instituted a process at the beginning of production; we call it the ‘cultural view’.

Through this, we get a sense of whether we’re 90 percent of the way there and we’re going to allow a few countries to make some modifications - or wow - we have a concept that just simply won’t work anywhere…

Susie We definitely look at it from a couple of aspects as far as the importance. We have the G8 that scopes out to the G12, but then we do keep an eye on some of the emerging markets. We are investing in some of those - the ones where we think we can have some short-term sales growth.

…and sometimes we do.

Fiona It happens.

Susie Sometimes we pick up some very clear Americanisms that just simply won’t translate. From the visual perspective that’s where we allow more flexibility when working with the various countries. It may not pass legal clearance, or in order for it to be relevant in India we are going to need to include an Indian CEO in the design or a Japanese CEO in Japan, or just allow some flexibility in how the final piece of production works.

Fiona Obviously no one has unlimited budgets.

Susie Exactly, that’s exactly right. That’s the fine balance that we are walking, which is, we try to produce as much as we can to be able to be used in as many countries as possible.

But at the same time we also can’t say “you have to take this and run with it” if it’s just not going to work.

From a global strategy perspective, my team keeps an eye on what comes next. We’ve obviously all heard about the BRIC economies and then we have Turkey, Indonesia, Poland, South Africa and Saudi Arabia.

We keep an eye on where economies are trending. Are there any particular technologies, mobile as an example? Is there something we want to pilot in a particular country? Because we want to make sure we have critical mass so that any pilot that we do will be successful.

Fiona How do you go about choosing what level of customization is required for each different market that you’re in?

Susie A lot of it has to do with simply understanding the market and I think the length of time that our company has been in the market as well.

How long have we had a presence, and how long has the campaign been there?

Fiona How do you go about deciding which 48

Building Your Business From The Brand Up

It’s an ongoing evaluation, because there are certain things like I said with product - it’s pretty straightforward. We are not going to allow too many changes; maybe they want to do an 800 number or something different to some of the words. But when you are talking about the brand specifically - the nuances with Japan, and I’m sure everyone has the same experience, but we allow quite a bit of customization for Japan. I think it’s a peculiarity of that market. With China as well, with the whole NSA scandal - we are hyper sensitive to all the external factors that we have to deal with.

uestion Time:

Why is it important for Global Marketers to be continually learning and developing?

As Global Marketers our jobs are to help ensure our companies succeed in worldwide markets. More than half of all consumers only buy products and services in their native language. You need 13 languages to reach 90% of the global online economic market place. Without content in these languages your company is missing out on international revenue opportunities.

And even with content in these languages, if the content is not culturally appropriate you can miss the mark and miss the market opportunity. Our focus is to help ensure that content ‘translates’ across languages in a seamless, transparent and measurable manner to ensure international market success for our clients – eliminating language barriers. This includes providing technology that ensures seamless integration and automated workflows with transparency and reporting so that marketing projects across languages are simple.

And that’s ongoing. That’s where we say at the beginning of the cultural review phase - here’s your moment to tell us. If you don’t raise your voice now, we may not have the flexibility to allow it later.

Fiona Speak now or forever hold your peace.

Susie Exactly. We also need our agency to know if we don’t inform them what’s not working, they will continue to proceed as usual. It really needs to be a team effort. We have local agencies to support but it rolls back into a corporate US agency, so there are the nuances of those various relationships as well.

Without continuous learning innovation would stall and innovation in a global, multilingual world is essential to ensure your content is processed and released quickly, seamlessly, to the highest culturally adapted levels in an agile world and reaches and resonates with your target markets for global success. I love what I do and look forward to another decade of learning and evolution.

Fiona In your experience, what are some of the more common traps companies fall into when are deciding to take their marketing campaigns global?

Susie I think the number one and we feel it all the time - is pressure to get something into market. Again you fall in love with a concept, and then you’re a little hesitant to want to change it no matter what you hear.

Gráinne Maycock Vice President, Sales Sajan

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The other thing is we often find these fantastic new platforms to use in the US and we go and do a ton of research to see, okay how many other countries are supported on that platform and will it scale.

And again with the budget like the US has, which is significantly larger than some of the countries, it makes sense.

We want to pilot these innovations but at the same time, a lot of times the countries will see the innovation and want it replicated and then it’s either too complex or the production would double or triple. It’s one of these things you have to constantly keep an eye on.

Keeping global in mind from day one, is there another alternative - is there a way to do it in a more simplified version?

Those are really the more common ones that we see. Then there are our own specific lessons too.

We used to do the review about the second phase of production. So several executives had already approved it, it was ready to go - and then we found out we had issues. By instilling that cultural review a little bit earlier in the process we are not having so many ‘okay, stop the presses, we’ve got to go back to square one in a couple of these places’.

We also work closely with the Ad agency and with the advertising team so it’s constantly having a partnership - also with the media agencies as well. That’s the other thing with global campaigns, because in the network of global media partners they also want to be coming out with these innovations. It’s making sure we have ongoing dialogue and we have instituted regular meetings with each country, because they want these innovations and we don’t want to shut them down. Sometimes they are cost effective in the market but at the same time it could mean more production dollars than we had anticipated.

As long as we have some visibility into it and it doesn’t surprise us, then we are in a good

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place to be able to support it and say run with it, let’s test it.

Fiona You mentioned executing global campaigns as being a team effort. What key attributes would you look for in someone to lead that effort?

Susie I really do think from a global marketing perspective, global is something that needs to be in your DNA. I think people ‘can’ learn it, but you always have to have the radar on, you always have to be searching for what’s coming next.

It’s part inquisitive I would say, part flexible.

You have to be flexible, you have to be adaptable, but I think you have to have that sort of innate understanding and constant view of ‘okay, is this going to work?’ and questioning. It’s very, very easy to get back into your comfort zone and focus on the market you’re living in and put it as your first priority.

For me, it’s been great working across the various marketing teams as far as remembering to ask the question ‘Is this going to work?’. We are getting a few more advocates, which I think is really key.

Having lived in a different country or speaking another language is also a benefit in just understanding what happens during the World Cup in Brazil, or maybe the traffic strikes in the tube in London. You just understand the people better. It’s more than that you can just read in a newspaper - it’s cultural.

You’re searching for it every day. You’re really trying to understand ‘what might impact my ability to be successful in a particular country?’. Sometimes that’s an external factor that you are not going to be able to overcome. You need to understand that, you need to understand that you can’t

Building Your Business From The Brand Up™

control it all - that’s where you need to start making judgments.

out in a particular country. A lot of the times it’s just negotiating with some of the sites.

Fiona The internet and new media are inherently more ‘global’ than traditional media. What sort of challenges or advantages, do you think they present when you’re coordinating and executing a global campaign?

The challenge is we can get a sense of ‘one size fits all’. You can’t forget you’re looking at search engines around the world and you’ve got Yandex in Russia, and that’s the platform you should be on. In Japan it’s still Yahoo.

You can’t necessarily say okay this is my platform - it’s not a one size fits all approach.

Susie The key benefit is the measurement.

We get rapid measurement from a lot more of these technologies and we are seeing the results that are a little bit less ‘opinion’.

We are seeing some great innovations outside of the US and we do pilot those, which is fantastic to see. Then we find out if there is anything relevant and once we see the measurements, we’ll check with some of the other countries to see if there’s anything similar and/or if it’s been brought to us by our media partner we will check and see if we have the ability to roll that same technology

You just need to be aware what’s out there.

We have had some good success - and again we check with the countries - will LinkedIn work? Does this? Does that? Would you want to pilot it? We check with them, but again, because of our presence we have a much more comprehensive social media team in the US. Some of our platforms like Facebook and Twitter have many more followers. We keep that in mind when we go to Japan and say, okay at this point we are just looking for some base numbers.

We’re not looking for that CEO or CIO which we might be looking for in the US, because they just don’t have that comprehensive a program.

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Fiona So, when it comes to the ‘business end’ of the campaign and measuring its success - Do you judge it by one set of global metrics? Do you focus on different sets of local metrics?

Or - is it sort of a delicate blend of both?

Susie It’s definitely a blend of both of those.

Actually this is something that really sort of struck me about a month ago. We look at all the metrics and we have to keep in mind that we have been in the US since 1998 and we’ve always had some level of advertising campaign. In some countries we have invested or divested, so we have to keep in mind that we haven’t had that consistent presence. So when we are looking at numbers with the CEO or CIO we may not be able to have this comparison. It’s very, very important for us to understand this.

We have a lot of traffic that comes to the US website from our global countries. When we look at the data, we have to be fair and not necessarily have the same standards. We want to see the engagement, but we know in countries like Japan and India they are still reading newsprint, so that’s a little harder to measure than the click through perhaps on CNN or something like that.

Fiona It’s all about how the different markets are willing and wanting to receive the information.

How they want to be communicated with.

Susie This is something we are actually working on for this next fiscal year.

For example - mobile has been going through the roof in India for us, and so we have increased our spend and efforts in mobile for India, to reach a particular audience that engages while they are on transport and coming to the office.

This is again sort of future looking, but we had a little bit of a ‘wow, why isn’t India performing at the same level as another particular country’. Then we started looking at those numbers and then at the various tactics - and now we’re looking at different goals for different countries on our platforms.

Fiona It’s always an ongoing process of evolution of measuring and adjusting from there.

Susie Absolutely, tactics in particular - you know, we were all but ready to throw out print in the US. But candidly we’re not at that point in many of the countries around the world. It’s still very relevant, it’s still very targeted for the audience that we’re going after. That’s the other thing we have to keep in mind. While there is new media - we can’t forget the old in some places, it hasn’t run its course yet.

Fiona Vesey Editor-in-Chief | Brand Quarterly Magazine Fiona is Co-Founder of Vesey Creative, the international Branding and Graphic Design agency behind Brand Quarterly magazine, for which she serves as Editor-in-Chief.

She thrives in partnering with people and companies wanting more than just aesthetically pleasing design, using her natural ability to build relationships, communicate and truly understand clients businesses to create result generating, people focused design and branding - and great magazines...

Fiona is passionate about learning from industry thought leaders and enjoys sharing those conversations with others through her ‘Influencer Insights’ features.

www.veseycreative.com 52

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Learn Winning Strategies for Global Branding & Digital Media Success

conference INNOVATIVE GLOBAL MARKETING STRATEGIES

LONDON

THIS YEAR’S SPEAKERS INCLUDE REPRESENTATIVES FROM:

October 1-2 2014 Brand2Global is a conference for executives in Global Marketing, focusing on 4 key areas:

Lenovo

Affectiva

Microsoft

Carat

• Global Branding

• Global Marketing Campaigns

Accenture

Havas Media

• Global Digital Media

• Global Customer Experience

Volvo Cars

PetLove.com.br

Lego

Jampp

Google

Uber

Nielsen

SAP

Kasperskey Lab

SDL

KLM

Zipcar

As a gathering of representatives from business and other stakeholder groups - this conference is the place to be for any organisation aiming to position itself as a leader in the field of Global Marketing.

REGISTER NOW and join the other top Global Marketing decision makers attending in 2014.

Take advantage of our Early Bird Discount through August 8 www.brand2global.com

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Program Preview Over the following pages, you will find a sample of what to expect at Brand2Global 2014.

This program preview contains those speakers and sessions that are confirmed at the time of publishing - including those speakers where a session title or description was not available.

There will be more speakers and full session details confirmed in the weeks leading up to the conference. Please visit the conference site at www.brand2global.com for the most up to date latest speaker and session details.

KEYNOTE Leveraging New Age Marketing To Level The Playing Field For Global Brands AJIT SIVADASAN VP/GM, Lenovo.com | LENOVO Marketing is going through a dramatic transformation led by social and mobile marketing.

The new age customers are less interested in what brands have to say if they are not deeply emotional and interesting. In an environment like this how do brands differentiate themselves? Is this differentiation enough to build loyalty and advocacy? Are the fundamentals of Marketing still intact or are they under threat?

This presentation will attempt to address some of these questions and share some of what Lenovo is doing to drive its brand and customer experience through new world marketing globally.

PAIGE WILLIAMS Director of Global Readiness MICROSOFT 54

ANNA VILHELMSSON Senior Manager Content Distribution VOLVO CARS program preview

Why KLM Thinks Global Customer Support Will Become The Most Important USP VÉRONIQUE VISSER E-development Manager, Content KLM.com | KLM Evolving from our Customer Experience development cycle, KLM has created a vision on global Customer Support . We are convinced that Customer Service will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. It is the social revolution, but also other technical innovations such as mobile, tablets and other wearables, that people want to be pro-actively informed asap, and helped if needed.

Therefore, not only we need to think of customer support as a phone number or contact point, it must be in the DNA of all our current and future projects.

Professionalizing Luxury Brands For A Global Marketplace MARKUS KRAMER Partner | BRAND AFFAIRS In a global market place driven by technological disruption, novel business models and new consumer trends many luxury companies face a host of marketing challenges. As demand for luxury products faces uncertainty, even the most emotionally charged brands on the very top of the branding epitome will have to look at bringing more rationality into their business models.

This session will explore what Luxury marketing is, how it is different and what any brand can learn from it.

LEGO Social Media: Building Social Value Brick By Brick LARS SILBERBAUER ANDERSEN Global Director of Social Media & Search LEGO

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Can’t Read, Won’t Buy: Why Language Matters On Global Websites DR. DONALD DEPALMA Chief Strategist & Founder | COMMON SENSE ADVISORY If you read English natively, you have enjoyed the best of the web since its creation. Content in this language has dominated the medium for nearly two decades while companies have catered to Englishspeaking markets and the enormous spending they generate. However, many corporations realize that billions of people don’t read English at all or well enough to make buying decisions, so they’re increasing the amount of information that they offer in other languages. As they reach out to global prospects, the big question is: If they localize their websites, will more buyers come? If they translate product literature, will they sell more? How much will localization help them grow?

To answer these questions, Common Sense Advisory surveyed consumers in 10 non-Englishspeaking countries to test the hypothesis that companies can increase their sales by localizing their products and websites. In this presentation, Dr. DePalma summarizes the results of this survey, analyzes the linguistic preferences of consumers, and discusses the impact on their online behavior.

He will discuss the interaction of brand and language, and explore the customer experience (CX) through the lens of language.

The Rest Of The World Is Most Of The World Evolving Mindsets And Practices In Web Globalization

BRUNO HERRMANN Director of Globalization | THE NIELSEN COMPANY

KEVIN CARL Managing Director ACCENTURE 56

AMY PAQUETTE Global Digital and Brand Strategy Leader CISCO program preview

The Science Behind Emotions : How Can Emotions Empower Your Brand Communication?

ERIC TOURTEL General Manager, Latin America | EBUZZING NICHOLAS LANGEVELD President & CEO | AFFECTIVA ANTHONY RHIND Global Chief Digital Officer | CARAT In a online world where ads are either skipped or liked, emotions appear as a key element to catch user’s attention, connect with them and build favorability for your brand.

Emotional tracking brings a new understanding on how your audience reacts to your advertising, but it can also help you to adjust your mediaplanning with your agency. We will discuss during this panel how emotions can be measured and deciphered and will discover what we can learn from the most viewed and shared ads. Evian will also explain how Baby & me makes the consumer smiles at the brand.

Shattering The Language Barrier: Uber Goes Global ALISON TOON Senior Director, New Markets | SMARTLING MINA RADHAKRISHNAN Head of Product Management | UBER When a company expands beyond its borders, localization becomes an essential part of branding.

The key to globalization is localization. To effectively connect with their customers, companies need to create multilingual content that is culturally relevant.

From websites to mobile apps, tech innovations are transforming the translation business, making it possible to get up and running in new markets faster than ever. Now in 34 countries, Uber, one of the hottest, fastest-growing global companies, used cloud-based technology to quickly leapfrog the competition and establish themselves as a global brand. Using agile translation, Uber employed a localized approach to going global.

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How Do You Globalize Your Content Marketing Strategy?

Learn From Successful International Brands And Leaders In Digital Innovation.

ERIC INGRAND VP of Content Marketing, EMEA | ENVERITAS GROUP LARS SILBERBAUER ANDERSEN Global Director of Social Media & Search | LEGO Looking to boost your brand abroad – to seize opportunities in new international markets?

How do you ensure your brand image and communications are relevant to markets whose culture and language are so different from your own?

How do you gain credibility and loyalty among foreign fans and followers?

Listen to innovative brands and content strategists talk about how they have achieved success outside of their home countries – and the challenges they encountered along the way.

This panel discussion will give you the insights you need to create a winning multicultural content marketing strategy for launching your brand abroad

The Next Big Thing: Marketing Localization Automation MICHAEL MEINHARDT Founder, Chief Customer Officer | CLOUDWORDS Marketing automation optimizes the creation and delivery of marketing campaigns, but the challenge of localizing campaign content to engage multilingual audiences remains a long, costly process. In this session, Michael Meinhardt, Co-founder of Cloudwords, and an executive from Marketo will discuss how integrating a multilingual marketing solution with a marketing automation platform enables marketers to optimize and accelerate the localization process. The session will include a case study about how both Marketo and Marketo customers are using Cloudwords’ integration with Marketo to localize content and implement global marketing strategies more quickly and more cost-effectively in each target market.

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program preview

Secure, Up And Running Social Insights Organizational Practices And Technological Innovations To Create Efficiencies In Global Marketing And Branding

BRIANNE MOORE Business Solutions, Customer Experience Management | SDL KATIE RIGBY-BROWN Business Development | SDL DAVID PRESTON VP of Marketing, Europe | KASPERSKY LAB This discussion will highlight the constraints, current trends, organizational practices and technology innovations in creating efficiencies for global marketing and branding.

What strategies have marketers employed to manage their global brand in the context of big data and the ever mushrooming cloud of multilingual customer voices? Does taking a brand into an emerging market impact on its core message? In order to have a holistic discussion, it is important to address pain points and resolutions from both the client and solution provider’s view to demonstrate the partnership approach.

With input from experts, working for some of the world’s best known brands, this panel will allow for a fluid discussion about global marketing, prioritization of market expansion and necessity of cultural understanding for effective digital strategies. It will focus on the value-driven approach to global marketing and expansion into new markets with relevant content, which language will naturally feature.

Innovation: China’s Next Advantage PROF. GEORGE YIP Professor of Management & Co-Director, Centre on China Innovation | CEIBS

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Global Marketing Trends And Research Insights PROF. DR. DIETER GEORG HERBST Head Post-MBA “Digital Brand Management around the World” BERLIN UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS, CAREER COLLEGE PROF. DR. BRENDAN MCSWEENEY Professor of Management ROYAL HOLLOWAY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON PROF. DR. GOETZ GREVE Professor of Marketing & VP, Research & International Affairs HAMBURG SCHOOL OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION DR. NITISH SINGH Assoc. Professor of International Business & Director of Program Innovations BOEING INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS, ST. LOUIS UNIVERSITY This panel is about emerging trends, concepts and ideas that are shaping global marketing field.

The panel will discuss a range of themes including global customer engagement, social CRM, global digital media and cross-national insights. The panel is comprised of top academic experts who are recognized for their innovation and applied research.

MICHELLE PRIVAT OBERMEYER Global Readiness Manager, Microsoft.com MICROSOFT 60

VIKTORIA TCHOUDAKOV Head of Search & Maps Marketing, EMEA GOOGLE program preview

Co-Creating With Consumers In Asian Markets TOM DE RUYCK Managing Partner & Head of Consumer Consulting Boards | INSITES CONSULTING Online Consumer Collaboration Platforms are the new star in marketing. These online platforms connect a company with a group of interested and interesting consumers to collaborate with them in projects. With the rise of social media, Asian consumers are ready to co-create the future of brands and products/services, more than ever. Are Asian companies ready for it as well?

In this presentation, we share tips on how to successfully collaborate with consumers in Asian markets, all illustrated with cases from brands like Philips, Campbells & Quinny. Asian consumers are ready for co-creation. Many brands are looking at the Asian markets for growth opportunities.

According to Bloomberg, 5 of the top 10 emerging economies lie in Asia. China, Indonesia and India are leading the pack. It is the rising middle class in these regions that makes for a huge business potential to arise.

Branding 4 Good: Global Branding Sustainably KATE COX Managing Partner, Strategy | HAVAS MEDIA

GRﾃ！NNE MAYCOCK Vice President, Sales SAJAN

YANNICK BARRIOL Director of Marketing ZIPCAR www.brand2global.com

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Global Branding In Emerging Markets – The Latin American Case FABIANO CID Managing Director | CCAPS JOANA PICQ Head of International Business Development | JAMPP GLEYCE OLIVEIRA Media Manager | PETLOVE.COM.BR When building a company from scratch requires a Herculean effort and you need to develop a deep understanding of a Kafkaesque system, when investors do not chase you in your MBA course and periods of economic stability run shorter than your favorite TV series, you are left alone with creativity, stamina and sheer stubbornness. This is the scenario faced by most entrepreneurs in emerging economies. Yet the survival of the fittest has made true talent emerge, particularly in Latin America.

In this session promising entrepreneurs and junior executives will share their marketing strategies and innovative thinking – and perhaps a tip or two on survival techniques.

JULIO LEAL Head of Localization CIENA

JAMIE TURNER CEO 60 SECOND COMMUNICATIONS

Remember: This program preview those speakers and sessions that were confirmed at the time of publishing. There will be more speakers and full session details confirmed in the weeks leading up to the conference. Visit www.brand2global.com to stay up to date with the latest additions.

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Language: The Vital Heart Of Your Brand Strategy Alison Toon | Smartling

I’m constantly being asked:

than ever before. And there is machine translation, which needs much nurturing before it will produce results of any value. But together, it makes a very exciting time to be working with translation technology!

•• How do I make the right translation decisions for my business?

•• Why should I pay for human translators, and not just free, computer-generated translation instead?

Decisions on which languages to translate into are decisions that everyone who buys translation services must make, based on their own business strategy. In the past, they also had to struggle with technical issues before even beginning to translate.

If a product, service, or website had not been designed to be “international” from the beginning, it was difficult, if not impossible, to add languages. Imagine coping with those challenges, plus all of the mobile delivery platforms that we have today, and it quickly became a nightmare!

•• How can I make sure that my brand is faithfully and accurately represented in new markets, but is also culturallysensitive and appropriate?

•• What does translation technology do?

•• And most importantly, how can translation, and language, help to reach new markets and new revenues - and fundamentally, why must we translate at all?

The answer to the last question is simple: it’s a big world, and it increasingly speaks, and spends money in, languages other than English. According to a recent study

by Common Sense Advisory, 55% of online consumers only buy products and services in their native language. Businesses need to communicate in 13 languages to reach 90% of the online global economic community, and the number of languages needed to maintain that 90% is rising. Communicating in multiple languages is now a requirement, not an option, for doing business globally.

Happily, there is new technology that is designed for this new, global reality.

Companies large and small can harness the power of this technology to deliver the most inspirational and meaningful content to their customers, regardless of where they are in the world. You can have full transparency into the business processes for creating your multilingual content. If you want to connect with the person who is beautifully translating your brand messages into Arabic, Korean, or Kurdish, you can easily do so.

You can now deliver a professionally translated website in many languages in a matter of weeks, as opposed to months or a year or more, and without struggling with technology or IT. Quality is improved by providing the best translators with the best translation tools.

The translation industry is going through a revolution. New, cloud-based technology is changing the lives of translation managers.

There are many more businesses and organizations that are realizing how important it is to communicate with customers in their own language. More people can access more information in many more ways, on many different devices. There is a huge increase in demand for content in many more languages

This may not sound exciting to anyone who has never managed the translation of a website, but for those of us who have, it’s

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Building Your Business From The Brand Up

Alison Toon Senior Director, New Markets | SMARTLING Alison is a veteran of the translation industry with two decades of experience. As Senior Director, New Markets at Smartling, she is responsible for managing the Smartling Partner Program and nurturing relationships between Smartling and translation agencies across the globe. Prior to Smartling, she was head of globalization at Hewlett-Packard, where she managed HP’s translation program across the entire company, overseeing the flow of multilingual and global content. Alison was responsible for managing translation and localization tools, processes, architecture and operation for content management and e-business services across the enterprise.

www.smartling.com

thrilling. It’s like watching a developing nation jump from having no telephones to everyone having smartphones, bypassing the installation of any landline telephone infrastructure. In the same way, companies who are going global for the very first time are choosing cloud-based services that allow them to check progress, answer questions, manage their translation assets, and connect with their team of language experts around the world, from anywhere and at any time. Previously manual and time-consuming processes such as file exchange and version control are automated, allowing the focus to be where it should be: on delivering the best translations.

uestion Time:

Why is it important for Global Marketers to be continually learning and developing?

The ability to learn no matter your age or position is vital in all walks of life. But when you work in an industry-leading technology company it’s even more important to keep an open mind. It’s a fast paced sector and the minute you stop innovating and learning you fall behind.

At Smartling, we like to say that translation is like music: a mix of art and science. And, like music, translated content can sound ordinary, it can fade into the background, or it can be truly inspirational. Nobody wants to sound out of tune, or inappropriate. Your translated content should be just right for your brand and your customers, with everything in harmony. Translation technology today serves as the conductor, guiding your translation resources to make your translated content sing in tune, and in harmony with the market in which it will be used.

Technology is a great leveler – someone with very little experience can have as many great ideas as an industry veteran – so if you hold a senior position you need to listen to and learn from everyone around you, not just your peers.

Eric Tourtel General Manager, Latin America Ebuzzing

It’s thrilling to see all these young, new, exciting companies going global with no pain.

It’s exciting to see how quickly they can reach new customers, in their own language, with inspirational messaging. It’s the new model for going global. There is no language barrier -we’ve broken through!

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Trends In Consumer Loyalty Kyle Clark | MasterCard

How many loyalty programs are you a member of? Better yet, how many of those loyalty programs do you actually participate in? Why do you participate in the loyalty program of Brand A, but not Brand B? These questions may seem simple, however a Loyalty Marketer knows that the answer to them is the difference between increased revenue from loyal customers and a high attrition rate.

Loyalty programs have evolved since S&H Green Stamps helped pioneer the simple idea of giving consumers stamps based on their spend, that could be redeemed for merchandise. In 1981, American 66

Airlines expanded on the stamp concept by introducing the now familiar AAdvantage program. Within days, United rolled out Mileage plus, with Delta and TWA following suit within the year1.

The year 1981 is key for two reasons: Consumer Loyalty became table stakes for airline companies (and in the following years, all consumer facing companies), and consumers were now faced with the question “Which program is the best�? Likewise, Loyalty Marketers now had to address the challenge of a lack of differentiation between companies.

Building Your Business From The Brand Up

The sheer number of programs in the market today leads many consumers to see loyalty programs as merely “earn points, get stuff” campaigns. This makes it difficult for a Loyalty Marketer to use a loyalty program alone to attract and retain customers. In the US, the average household is enrolled in 21.9 programs, with only 9.5 of those memberships active2. In the UK, 95% of the population is a member of a loyalty program3.

This shows the number of programs a consumer must consider when making purchase decisions about a brand.

Not all is lost – loyalty programs are very effective. Redeemers in a loyalty program spend almost three times more than nonredeemers in a program. In addition to the increased spend; attrition of redeemers is nearly half compared to non-redeemers. The key question for a Loyalty Marketer becomes – How do I increase the number of redeemers among my best customers?

Differentiation is the answer. But how to differentiate? Current trends in loyalty programs show that the typical “earn points, get stuff” is no longer interesting to a consumer. This is evidenced by Merchandise only comprising 2% of total reward costs for a program in 2012, down from only 4% in 2008. Consumer preference has shifted, and consumers now demand better value and increased flexibility from their loyalty programs.

In Engagement Isn’t Just a Fad, MasterCard’s Bob Grothe makes a key observation: “67% of consumers surveyed would use their payment card more if they had the ability to use points for purchases. Additionally, 44% indicated they would switch banks or card companies to sign up for a program that allowed points to be used for purchases”.

This research shows that consumers are demanding better value and flexibility. Brands that identify a way to provide this ability to their consumers will capture additional redeemers in their program. Flexibility in where points are spent and the perceived value created for the consumer is the basis for the next generation of loyalty programs.

The question a Loyalty Marketers should focus on is: “How can I be wherever my customers need me to be?” The POS is a key point of interaction in the future of loyalty program operations.

Giving greater control to customers as it relates to reward redemptions is key to future success. Allowing customers to use points anywhere for anything they want will move your program from “close to what I want” to “exactly what I want.”

References: 1. http://www.frequentflier.com/programs/history-ofloyalty-programs/ 2. http://www.colloquy.com/files/2013-COLLOQUYCensus-Talk-White-Paper.pdf 3. http://www.sas.com/offices/europe/uk/press_office/ press_releases/UK-consumers-sign-up-to-loyalty.html

Kyle Clark VP, Loyalty Solutions Global Product Development | MasterCard As Vice President, Loyalty Solutions Global Product Development for MasterCard, Kyle Clark focuses on the creation of innovative products and solutions for MasterCard’s global client base. Kyle has almost ten years of experience in consumer loyalty technology and product development. He has designed multiple consumer loyalty solutions for Fortune 500 companies. His experience in technology and product development gives him the broad knowledge necessary to create forward thinking solutions in a constantly evolving global market.

The views expressed by Kyle are not necessarily those of MasterCard.

www.mastercard.com

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