5 Ways to Adapt Your Brand for a Global Audience
Today’s guest blogger, Katie Mills, shares her tips for adapting your brand for a global audience:
So you have a successful product, blog, or company and you are ready to expand to a wider audience? First of all, congratulations! Making the move from local to global is a big step for any company or brand. However, with big steps come big responsibilities and big decisions to make. Here are five things to consider when you are ready to take your brand to the world stage:
Intended Market
First things first, you need to decide where you want to expand your brand to. While it may be very tempting to say “EVERYWHERE!,” it is important to scale up responsibly and the best way to do that is to focus on one specific region or country. When selecting your new market, you should conduct considerable research into how the consumers’ habits and the economic conditions would impact the reception and success of your brand. When analyzing the location, its proximity to other possible growth markets is also something to consider — the easier to continue your expansion, the better!
Target Audience
Once you have selected your new target market region, it is now time to hone in on your target audience. You probably already have a well-established one for your brand in your current market — let’s say women aged 16–35 for your fashion blog, so it is important to understand whether your current target consumer is available and interested in your type of brand or product in the new region you have selected. Maybe you need to expand your age range to include ages 40 to 50 to reach a larger percentage of the population, or conversely, maybe you need to focus in on a particular style of fashion to capture the unique tastes of the country.
Cultural Adaptation
While your current brand style, marketing campaign, and promotion tactics may be working spectacularly well here in the U.S., they may need to be tweaked — or all together changed — to find success in a new country. Cultural norms and preferences are essential to consider when deciding how your brand will best fit into the current market, especially at the point of entry when you need to make a great first impression.
A great example of this is Apple’s classic Mac vs. PC campaign. I’m sure you remember it — Justin Long plays the fun and creative Mac while John Hodgeman plays the boring and confused PC. They were funny and resonated well with the U.S. audience, as well as with most European audiences. In the Japanese market, however, they did not fare so well. In this culture it is rude to brag about your strengths or compare yourself to others, so the campaign came off as harsh and didn’t endear customers to Apple like it did in the U.S.
Competition
Analyzing and evaluating your brand against the competition in the market is certainly not a new concept to most of us. It just makes sense to understand the tactics of similar companies or brands — “Know thine enemy,” as they say.
In the global market, this gets slightly trickier, however. It is important to consider how open consumers in your new target market are to change and their underlying perception of U.S or any foreign companies. If your target audience is obsessed with US culture, go ahead and stick a big ole’ Born in the USA sticker on the front, but if they are strong nationalists who frown on outsiders — that might not be such a good idea.
Marketing Mix
Again, deciding on the best marketing mix for your product or to reach your target audience is probably something you understand well as an already established and successful brand. However, research into the preferences of your target audience is key. While your current millennial-focused SnapChat and Instagram heavy campaign may have worked wonders in the U.S., it would probably not be as successful in some place like Italy, where consumers are still way behind on the social media bandwagon.
So, if you do your homework, plan ahead, and focus on these 5 concepts — you and your brand will be unstoppable!
