How to evaluate your buying decisions? - Conscious Stage

Conscious Stage 
Organizations at this stage are just beginning to realize all that is involved in multilingual communications. The Conscious stage is still very project driven, but projects become more repeatable and cost awareness is growing. Organizations are testing out new markets.

Below is an overview of the Conscious Stage compared to the other reactive stages:
 

How do I protect my brand identity in foreign markets?
It's normal at this stage that organizations try to go through local affiliates (this could be your distributor, employee within a local office, etc.) for basic translation needs as local affiliates know the needs of the audience, are knowledgeable of the subject and provide a low cost option over a translation vendor. However, local affiliates usually lack time to translate materials on time and brand consistency is often a concern.

It's a challenge to control brand messaging and design standards over different local affiliates. Each have their own processes, resources and insights. We have seen with organizations in this stage, that decentralized efforts usually end up in dissatisfaction because decisions made at the local level do not align with the organization's expectations.

We find that the centralization effort is one of the first major efforts or organizations to think about process improvements in . Local affiliates are very useful in the process, but management of content and design needs to be controlled.

What can I expect from my vendor at this stage?
Aside from managing dedicated subject matter experts in client specific teams, in the case of centralization, your translation vendor should be the catalyst for process improvement. Translation becomes a cycle of content management, terminology and translation management and review management where the translation vendor can play a central role.

Also Read: Global Readiness Audit; It's our assessment model to assess the organization's needs for process improvement efforts that make the most impact at each stage of maturity.

Process management becomes a problem and a vendor should be able to control the process from release through translation, review and final product. Also, each step is managed so that the brand messaging is protected. There is an important role to play in understanding what could hurt the brand and how it should be managed from a design and terminology perspective. Vendors should be empowered with this information in order to manage and vendors should have excellent control over review processes with local affiliates and understand the dynamics at play.

Readiness Categories as it relates to
management levels in the organization

Also, a vendor should help to start you on the path of standardization. Style guides are very useful at this stage to define what elements are part of the global brand vs. what elements are local and how they should be implemented consistently. Organizations should rely on their translation vendor to have a process in place and to suggest process improvements. We have defined clear objectives and processes in our Language and Design Readiness Categories that are directly applicable to this stage of growth.

What input can I deliver in collaboration with my translation vendor to contribute to a positive outcome?
In earlier blog posts, we've written that it is important to protect the brand messaging. Translation is almost becoming a threat to brand consistency if not managed well. With your trust that your vendor will handle the management of the translation process, a successful outcome cannot be achieved without a clear understanding of the brand and brand messaging. Collaboration early on is essential to establish an understanding of the organization's goals and desired outcomes. Also, management of people and expectations need to be communicated from the organization to all parties. Too often have we seen that organizations who cannot commit to the process end up back to managing decentralized efforts, or at least, growing cost inefficiencies.

What processes do I optimize at this stage?
Considering that your translation vendor is trusted with most of the translation management, there are still processes that the organization can start to work on. In the Language and Design categories, we work to optimize the content and design creation process and make sure that the output is optimized for translation as well. Organizations should focus on small efforts with their writing staff and design team to plan projects ahead and standardize the output for translation.

Global style guides are also a good start as well as Translation and Terminology management together with Corporate Glossaries. This is an asset building exercise that requires input from the organization as well.

What are my risks?
Also Read: Case Study: How low cost purchasing decisions come back with a bite. This case study fits well with organizations at the Conscious level who manage repeatable projects.

Here are some of the risk factors we identified at this stage:

Risk factors in Conscious Stage

Consider that at this stage, your commitment to translation is growing. Translation work can quickly take its own path without any consideration for your brand or product. Consider that your brand is worth protecting as it is the brand and quality of work that brought you this potential. By taking care of your brand at this stage with a dedicated translation vendor that can manage your centralization efforts early on and by supporting the process as much as possible, the risks at this stage can be mitigated.



Metrics for Linguistic Screening of Product Names

There is a whole array of considerations that marketers and product developers go through before they even decide on a product name in their domestic market. However, these considerations are often overlooked during product name testing for their foreign markets.

When our clients come to us for linguistic screening of their English product names, our start is to take inventory of the main considerations that went into development of the brand for the domestic market. Here are a few examples of the most prevalent metrics for linguistic screening:

The Brand Concept

We consider the elements such as brand positioning, brand messaging, and product segmentation to be the foundation for analysis in the target market. We leverage the knowledge that was created during the name development to test and analyze in the target market.

The Language

Linguistic screening should not only take into account appropriate meaning in other languages but also the ease by which a product name can be pronounced by a person from another country. Pronunciation could be an important success factor in product name adoption. Product names are often ambiguous and created without direct meaning. Therefore, a valuable attribute could be a powerful sounding name. Names could be unintentionally softened through differences in pronunciation in the target market. Understanding how a product sounds in the target market can be valuable information in choosing a product name.

The Culture

Cultural analysis can include a wide variety of aspects. One example is the use of colors and images that are appropriate and engaging. Another aspect is name associations. In product name development, associations with competitors or other organizations is usually taken into account for different reasons (legal reasons, unique factor, etc.). Powerful associations can be made with similar words used in related or unrelated industries, or for instance in popular culture. Especially with highly ambiguous names, powerful associations that support the brand positioning can be a key success factor and should be tested in the target markets. Cultural views may vary by generation and therefore an important attribute is to understand the target segmentation of the product. Gender roles in purchasing are also important to consider as these differ by country. You may not be marketing to the decision maker!

Product Analysis

While actual product testing is not part of the scope for linguistic screening, we also should not discount the value of product analysis for the target market. Product aspects such as packaging and design can be taken into consideration and analyzed for further testing in the target market. Having product aspects analyzed before you test in your target market can help narrow down the goals for expensive tests using local focus groups.

The Linguistic Screening process should benefit from open communication and flow of information between product developers and linguistic and cultural analysts. Too many times, the brand development process is overlooked in product name development for a foreign market. When considering the investment that has gone into the product and the potential it could have, the investment in a carefully executed linguistic screening process should be a drop in the bucket.

The next time your client or your company wants to screen their English product name in other languages, give us a call for a proprietary process that we use.

Do you risk losing control of your brand?

We have mentioned in earlier posts that the decision to centralize control over your messaging will impact your brand identity. Centralization of brand messaging is the first step in creating a consistent brand identity. When it comes to multilingual communications however, some organizations rely on local experts to market and sell their products. These type of organizations must find a balance between ownership of their messaging at the corporate level to protect their brand identity and allowing for customization of their communications by local experts such as their in-country distributors.

Our spotlight is on the profile of a company that is emerging in several foreign markets at the same time. This company is using local distributors to market and sell their products in-country. Until this year, they have relied almost entirely on the local distributors to translate their packaging and marketing materials. When this organization approached us to help them develop a strategy for their global expansion, one of the key objectives that we determined in our SWOT analysis to be a top priority was to establish “control and ownership of messaging to protect brand reputation and identity”. This is one of the 6 metrics we have identified in the area of Strategic Readiness for companies managing their multilingual communications. In the Balanced Scorecard framework, this metric falls under Quality.

Click on image to enlarge

Mitigation of risks with this objective include:

• Brand management


• Competitiveness


• Legal requirements

If the distributors had full control of creating the messaging used to market this company's products, the company had no way of knowing whether the distributors always adhered to the guidelines and messaging on their U.S. packaging. This is a classic case of an organization risking brand dilution with no way to evaluate which claims were being made or how their brand appeared to buyers. Furthermore, the company's competitive advantage is driven by the claims that are made to entice buyers to purchase their products. A marketing strategy centered around a specific claim may work in one market while it would not be effective – or even legally acceptable – to make such a claim in another country. The U.S. based headquarters of this company had no control over these individual strategies and no way to ensure that each country's legal requirements were being met.

The first step for this company was to centralize and take ownership of the messaging. The second step is to take ownership of the distributor relationship in regards to their control over the messaging. These distributor experts can provide insight into the target market and how best to approach buyers. The distributors sell the product and should be involved in choosing terminology used in the translations. Terminology management became the central focus of this strategy to strengthen the brand, engage the distributors and "hear" their voice and provide linguistic evaluation for the organization to "own their messaging."

This metric in the LSI Client Mentor Program™ provides an action plan of 6 steps that an organization must evaluate and act upon for this objective. The organization is then measured not only on a number of quantitative issues but also on their change of perception in their committment to the objective. A score of "ingrained" with this metric is one more measurable way to move this company efficiently along the path of the Global Communication Maturity Model™.

The benefits of having a centralized approach with well-defined roles and responsibilities are clearly evident to this company We have an efficient and repeatable process (think Baldrige criteria) that can be applied to each new market as our client expands. In addition, we are able to scale efforts within existing markets in a cost-effective way due to the Translation Memory assets we’ve built.