Cultural Barriers: 4 Pitfalls to Avoid and 1 Easy Solution

Tetuan Valley
Jul 10, 2017 · 3 min read

A good introduction into a foreign market goes through a highly adapted and successful marketing strategy. You need to pay attention to everything, from the name of the brand or product that you are planning to launch to the price and competitors. To help, we’ve compiled a a list of things you need to be aware of and what can happen if you fail to adapt:

1. Company Name

How does you company name sound in the foreign language? Is it easy to pronounce? Does it remind people of a different word? Does it mean anything?

Be careful, so that you don’t end up like Audi’s E-Tron (Tron = excrement in French) or the famous science fiction channel Syfy (syphilis in Polish).

2. Slogans

Have a native speaker translate your slogans to be sure you don’t follow the steps of HSBC Bank, who had to spend $10 million to solve the translation of “Assume Nothing” into “Do Nothing” when expanding to Europe in 2009. Coors also made quite an impact when expanding to Spain, as its slogan ended up being interpreted by locals as “Suffer from diarrhea”. You can imagine what an impression they made on the Spanish market.

3. Competition

We humans are really resistant to change. To expand to a new market you need to convince the customers to change their buying habits, from a brand they know and trust to buying from you, a foreign newcomer. This means you need to know what your competition is doing and how the playing field looks like. If the competition is not doing it, it doesn’t mean straight away that it’s a good idea to try.

Check that the value proposition that is aiming to differentiate you from the local competition is adapted to the local culture, or end up like Walmart. They failed to recognise the German culture’s nuisances and tried to applied their successful American formula unmodified. In the end they spent $1B and were forced to pull out of the German market.

4. Product

The design of your product is center to win over the competition. However, this tends to be tailored to the market you are looking at. While you user-opinion based web page can be perfect for your market, what if you try to expand to a market where customers don’t trust each other and prefer to have a feel of how the company works? This is what threw eBay out of the Chinese market in 2006.

You need to know what are the behavioural patterns of the people in your new market to be able to adapt the design of your product specifically to their needs and habits. Adapting your product to the local market is a lot more than translating the language. Something that is totally intuitive in your native country may be totally strange somewhere else.

Solution

We’ve seen 4 big a costly internationalization mistakes so far, but how do you avoid them? Easy, involve people in your team that are native from those markets you are trying to expand to. They will know the market, the competitors, the language and the cultural differences in behaviours and preferences that will help you avoid these pitfalls!

Apply to the Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs behaviors to get a taste of what a motivated young entrepreneur can do for your internationalisation strategy and begin to explore foreign markets! Send us an email at erasmus@tetuanvalley.com we will help you through all the steps of the process.

Tetuan Valley

Tetuan Valley’s strongest attribute? Its community. The Tetuan Valley team, along with its outstanding alumni, mentors, and startup enthusiasts ….

Tetuan Valley

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helping entrepreneurs create startups.

Tetuan Valley

Tetuan Valley’s strongest attribute? Its community. The Tetuan Valley team, along with its outstanding alumni, mentors, and startup enthusiasts ….

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