Cross-border marketing: facing up to the challenge

For many brands looking to internationalize, globalization has been a difficult process to adapt to. While it holds rich potential in business opportunities, expanding into new markets and territories can be fraught with challenges.

Nowhere is this more evident than in developing a new marketing strategy designed to penetrate previously unexplored countries. While it is possible to rollout a campaign across several countries, the nuances of each one will need to be carefully considered, even if the campaign stays within Europe’s borders.

Europe illustrates the challenges of approaching several countries, which may appear similar from a marketing perspective. In reality, the continent encompasses dozens of different retail, cultural and linguistic environments. A brand looking to launch a new product across Europe will need to carefully consider each of these in turn to successfully open a commercially viable dialogue with new consumers. Taking one element of a campaign, for example, amply demonstrates this: point-of-sale (POS).

A marketer in London can design an extensive, large display for the continental roll-out of a new product within a supermarket. This would work well in France, for example, where hypermarkets are popular and, as a general rule, space is widely available. However, in Italy, while there are a number of hypermarkets, the retail sector is generally characterized by small convenience stores, which will not be able to display a vast POS unit.

Considering how simple and fast it is to activate the POS material in store is critical to ensure retailers and merchandisers don’t end up frustrated with material left in the store room and ultimately ending up in the waste bin, never to see the light of day.

Moving into diverse retail environments makes standardization a challenge. Even when the same material can be used across different stores, for example, there are still hurdles to be overcome. Some centrally managed retailers demand negotiation locally to get POS material in supermarkets. The second hurdle to overcome is language. Even the smartest and most innovative campaigns can get literally lost in translation. For English-speaking brands, they face a choice as to what extent they translate campaign messaging and slogans, particularly given the divergence it can cause in linguistic interpretations of a core strapline. The decision has to be taken over whether strong brand imagery and the original logo will be sufficient to build a presence elsewhere. On the flipside, use of local language brings a new level of engagement with consumers in other countries. In some cases, there is a legal requirement to translate material, so the choice is removed from the brand altogether. Outside Europe, the complexity of the situation can deepen, particularly as brands push into the Arabian Peninsula and Africa. Companies need to think about the values of their brand, how they will be received culturally, and how these will translate both literally and figuratively. Moving into developing markets can also present a challenge to logistics – the infrastructure can be extremely different from a distribution perspective, as can the retail and advertising environments.

However, this is not to downplay the enormous potential for brands to successfully roll-out campaigns across multiple jurisdictions – rather that the answer lies in taking a considered approach, one that understands that cultural, linguistic and other differences exist as you move from market to market. This is just being efficient. There is no point producing elegant POS material which cannot be activated in the locations it reaches. Instead, brands will need to take a careful, measured approach to ensure localization only happens when it will drive sales and not just to ‘be local’. They need to maintain a close watch on standard approaches, understanding national stores and using economies of scale where possible to reduce costs, as well as working with agencies who understand the retail market to gather intelligence and handle distribution efficiently.

Over the last ten years, there has been a significant shift towards quantifying the value and contribution of so-called measurable media (e.g. digital channels), sometimes at the cost of in-store shopper marketing studies. There is a huge amount of POS wastage, even in domestic campaigns, so brands need to examine their strategy to prevent repeating errors on a multinational scale. But fortunately we are now seeing resurgence in efforts quantify the performance of in-store collateral, which is also driving the need to assure best practice execution and measurement by factors such as market, format and store.

Technologies such as eye tracking, store level econometrics and algorithmic out of market assessments of POS collateral and artwork (mimicking human behaviors) are now coming back to the fore. This is a welcome development as it will provide the data-based evidence to show whether a POS campaign has or hasn’t worked. Making campaigns more accountable can only increase their overall effectiveness.

Sally Hooton