Over the 9 years of our agency's existence, we have worked with businesses of various sizes. Among our Clients, there are ambitious people who have set a goal to break into international markets. The motivation is clear - the desire to make a profit in euros or dollars, the intention to expand sales volumes, the desire to test one's strength.
At the same time, promotion on the international market implies certain specifics. It manifests itself both at the level of website development and in the organization of other marketing communications. In this article, we will analyze some of these points.
1. Consider the linguistic and cultural characteristics of the target audience
Marketing history knows many examples of advertising campaigns failing miserably because of ignoring the peculiarities of the mentality of a particular country. The examples we will now give concern large-scale advertising campaigns. However, exactly the same mistakes can be made on a website.
The same color can have different symbolic meanings in different countries. For example, in some Asian countries, white is considered a mourning color.
The designer used a photo of a girl in a white dress with a snow-white ribbon usa whatsapp number list in her hair on the website of a well-known company. But it turned out that in China they dress like that for funerals.
And in Arab countries they read from right to left. This was the reason for the legendary Coca-Cola failure - marketers who did not know the local culture prepared a series of prints:
Arab consumers were long surprised by such harmful advertising - it turns out that a briskly walking traveler drank cola and collapsed dead in the middle of the desert.
The same mistake can be made when creating a slider for a website designed for an Eastern audience.
There are even more comical situations. For example, the French baby food brand Bledina encountered difficulties in promoting itself in Russia. The name turned out to be completely unpleasant to the Russian ear.
At the level of inventing a domain name, you can encounter a similar problem. Quite often, Russian entrepreneurs spontaneously generate names for their foreign projects. And there are many foreign slang words, the existence of which they do not even think about. A spontaneously invented name can echo some such word and create negative associations that undermine consumer trust.