Half-Billion Dollars in U.S. Hispanic Advertising

Are you localizing for domestic buyers? When the locale or region for which you're locale-izing is actually your own, but with a demographic twist, it becomes a kind of internal localization.

This is a much-studied phenomenon (and economic driver) in the U.S., where estimates point to 46 million Hispanics with USD900 billion in spending power. Take both of those figures with a grain of salt, but there's a market there, and several industries - notably banks and wireless companies - are internally localizing their products and services for it.

Still, what's the point of localizing your product - toys, electronics, books, irrigation equipment, insurance policies - if your company is not spending money to promote it?

According to a study from the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies (AHAA), the top seven advertisers to U.S. Hispanics spent nearly USD500 million in 2007. However, a number of large companies well known for their ad budgets (Dell, Microsoft, Apple) are pretty stingy when it comes to promoting their products among Hispanics. More data here.

Does anybody bother with this internal localization besides U.S. companies? Do companies based in other countries need to think about internal localization, and how to promote global products internally? Does Michelin run Arabic-language commercials in France for its Algerian and Moroccan inhabitants? Does BMW run Turkish-language ads in German newspapers? Does China Mobile market its cellular service to English-language expatriates living there?

Companies like Verizon Wireless and Bank of America put in place the equivalent of an overseas office, by creating marketing, sales and product teams. They work inside the U.S., but in a different language and on different opportunities for different people from the main teams.

I don't think we're learning how to do this by watching companies in other countries. I think we're making it up as we go along. It's odd to think of localization without the international component to it, but it's part of our job as localizers.

Localization Still Needs You - The Myth of the Global Brand

Will your job go away as the world gets flatter? Not likely, according to an article by Eric Pfanner in the International Herald Tribune (link below).

Nigel Hollis, chief global analyst at the market research firm Millward Brown, argues that instead of becoming more alike, people are more eager than ever to assert their differences. And marketers - at least those who want to create global brands - ignore this at their peril.

This approach, which marketers refer to as "global/local," has been around for a while, and Hollis has a vested interest in supporting it.

"The vast majority of people still live very local lives," Hollis said. "By all means go global, but the first thing you have to do is win on the ground," he added. "You have to go local."

As localization manager, of course, your job is to keep your company's eye on the local side of global/local.

Do your execs think that the only thing people want to personalize is the choice of music on their iPod? How about the language in which they deal with you and you deal with them?

One size still doesn't fit all. Nor does one language.

Here's the link to the Pfanner article. Happy reading and happy localizing.

ISDN (I still don't know) about Localization

"There are still a zillion people who don't know about localization," the sales representative of the localization company told me. "Can you believe it? After all these years?"

Yes, I suppose I can. We can make sales calls and deliver presentations on the most efficient ways to localize until we're all ready to retire, and there will still be executives, companies and entire industries that haven't gotten the memo.

It's refreshing in some ways, and it keeps us from getting lazy. It reminds me of the ISDN craze around Internet access back in the mid-1990's, before cable and DSL made our choices simple (at least in the USA).

ISDN, or Integrated Services Digital Network, was a high-speed alternative to dial-up, but the phone companies were not very successful in taking the service from the early adopters to the early majority. The acronym became redefined as "I still don't know," because most people couldn't understand the service well enough (or afford it, for that matter) to see how it would benefit them.

The upside: There are still, and will be for a long time, opportunities to sell translation and localization services. As soon as all of our customers know about localizing products and how to do it efficiently, they'll turn to The Next Thing, such as John Yunker's Web Globalization Report Card threshold of localizing the Web site into 20 languages. We won't run out of work, provided we stay a few steps ahead of our customers' requests.

The downside: We may spend a little less time educating new clients, but we're not completely out of the hand-holding business yet. Salespeople will still need to update their presentations and drag an engineer or project manager to that second-round meeting with the prospective client.

Just be sure to stay on top of localization developments and techniques so that you don't have to answer a prospect's question with "ISDN" (I still don't know).

Web Localization and the Cobbler's Children

"Why don't we have our Web site localized?" my business partner asked. "We're in the business, and a localized site would show that we're willing to put our money where our mouth is."

Excellent question. Why not get our site, or at least the pages that pertain to localization, localized? So I looked into it.

It was going to cost about US$2000 per language, when all was said and done, so I asked my partner if he'd be willing to split the cost with me. Perhaps you can guess his answer.

It was an interesting issue, though. Assume that a prospective customer, who doesn't know much about the industry, goes shopping for a vendor. She finds a vendor whose site is in only one language, and another whose site is in eight languages. Which vendor has more credibility, especially to somebody who doesn't know (or even want to know) a lot about localization?

Mind you, I'm not completely representative of the entire industry. I'm not a "language service provider," so that bit of credibility is of no great advantage to me. Still, it brings up the old chestnut about the cobbler's children running barefoot: Isn't it odd to be in localization, yet not have a localized Web presence?

My rationale, aside from the expense, is that almost nobody who would want our services would want to read about them in any other language besides English. That's probably the case for almost everyone in the American localization industry, where the dominant language conveniently matches the world's current lingua franca. Other languages just confuse most Americans anyway, so one could argue that it would be a needless distraction in the sales cycle.

What do you think your customers and prospects want to see? Can you get by with your marketing presence (Web, collateral, datasheets) in one language?

If you enjoyed this article, have a look at "Why Localize at All?"

Localization - Investment or Expense?

Would you rather expend or invest? Would your company rather expend or invest?

You walk into a pastry shop, buy a slice of cake and eat it. That's an expense because it doesn't last long and you can't use it to make anything else. You walk into a bank, buy a certificate of deposit and reap interest a few months later. That's an investment because it has some durability and you use it to make something else (more money).

A new client is testing the waters in Europe and Japan. To appear serious to prospects there, they asked me for a proposal on some multimedia projects they've hosted from their Web site. It took lots of phone calls and e-mail to ascertain exactly what they expected back, then lots of phone calls and e-mail to ensure that they had sent us everything we needed to estimate costs for a full, end-to-end solution.

They're a small company with solid domestic revenues and negligible overseas sales to date, so they felt sticker shock at the $3-4000 per language that this was going to cost. One of their executives tried to think nimbly: "See whether they can just do the voiceovers and give them to us. We can have our in-house editors replace that layer in the media files."

I don't mind nimble thinking, and I appreciate her attempts to save money, so I won't go into the many technical and quality-related concerns that this approach violates, but when I sent an adjusted quote, I wrote, "I understand that you had $1500/language in mind, but the original English media probably cost a good deal more than that, and you've likely forgotten what you spent on them because of how many prospects have clicked on them. I encourage my first-time clients to regard this is an investment, not an expense. If you choose your overseas markets and partners carefully, and handle translation and localization correctly from the start, your ROI will not be long in coming."

Do you agree? Have you spent time trying to convince your company's executives that good localization practices are an investment, not an expense? What's your favorite argument?

If you enjoyed this article, you may enjoy another one called "Why Localize at All?"

Why Localize At All?

This question seems more dangerous than it really is.

You should be asking it at the beginning of your localization lifecycle, because you need to convince yourself and others in the organization that the effort will pay off, or at least that the gamble is worth it. The decision to go global ripples to every department in the company, and some companies in certain vulnerable points in their life are not ready for it.

But you'll transform the question from, "We shouldn't localize at all," to "We shouldn't localize right now." So you engage in healthy waiting.

Later in life, after a few rounds of localization, somebody will pose the question again. "The extra revenue isn't worth it. We're spreading ourselves too thin. Why localize at all?" This too is healthy questioning. (There's usually a "Why don't they all just learn English?" from somebody on executive staff. It's best to just smile and steer the conversation away from such ratholes of hopeless ethnocentrism.)

At this point in company history, you'll likely rephrase the question to "Are we really localizing as smart as we could be? How can we do it more efficiently and only for the most profitable regions?" You'll introduce more efficiency and raise the profile of localization.

Go ahead and keep asking "Why localize at all?" It's good for you and for your organization. Start worrying when nobody poses the question any more.