Brand, Language, Color and Market Dress in Target Markets

You might not think it’s necessary to consider
changes in how you go to market abroad,
compared with in your home territories.
But successful entrepreneurs do.

THE FACE THAT YOUR PRODUCT OR SERVICE PRESENTS in your target market can make or break your business abroad. Unless you or members of your team thoroughly know the target market’s culture and language, you will probably need some outside help from knowledgeable advisors and potential customers to make sure you put your best foot forward. This section will help you organize your thinking so you can ask good questions and make smart choices, given the answers you receive.

Branding—do you need to put on a new face?

Hopefully you have developed a brand in your home market and it’s working well for you. Depending on your target market, it could work fine abroad. Or it could be disastrous. The biggest corporations in the world are not immune from brand blunders, so take this issue seriously, even if your company is a one-person band.

Some brands work well without a bit of adaptation. Singer sewing machines, Black & Decker tools, airlines, pharmaceutical companies and many others maintain their branding without change worldwide. But you can be sure that this consistency is not due to whimsical thinking. Unvarying global brands have survived very careful testing and scrutiny.

Other giants wisely massage their brands for certain target markets. One of the most-reported examples of brand adaptation comes from Coca Cola. If you simply search for characters that make the sound of “Coca Cola” in Chinese, the meaning of those characters is either “female horse stuffed with wax” or, more famously, “bite the wax tadpole.” Neither of these images makes you want to reach for a cold drink. So the Coke team adapted the brand name to sound like “kekou kele,” which fortunately means “let your mouth rejoice.” In the auto industry, that kind of mistake, not caught in time, proved costly. Ford introduced a vehicle into Spanish-speaking countries named the Fiera. However, in many Spanish dialects, fiera means ugly shrew. As you can imagine, the car did not sell very well under that name.

Obviously, the more you can keep your branding unified in all your markets, the better. Sometimes a brand’s modification that works well elsewhere can even lead to changing your original brand at home to match. Think of the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, second in sales to McDonalds in the fast-food world now. As the company grew beyond its Kentucky, US roots, it came to be known worldwide as simply KFC, and its logo portrait of Colonel Sanders, based on the original founder Harland Sanders, has been modified with time. Now, KFC can offer non-chicken meals anywhere in the world without any brand confusion. In China, where it’s the largest fast food chain, the menu includes tree fungus salad and rice congee, among other local dishes. It’s likely that the millions of KFC customers around the world have no idea what KFC originally stood for, and that’s fine with Yum! Brands, KFC’s parent company. (Notice that the name Yum! is a smart international food chain branding choice itself.)

It could be that neither of these strategies—adapting or staying globally consistent—is best for your company as it expands internationally. Depending on your business’s overall international strategy, you might even enter a foreign market under a new or shared brand. If you are partnering with a local company that has an established, respected brand, it might suit your products or services to market them under the local company’s brand. Or you can invest in developing a local brand that’s all your own. This may require a lot of resources and time, but it’s worth weighing against your other options.

Language challenges

The world is littered with hilarious, ribald, or downright weird translations of names, job titles, signs, instructions and so forth, as any traveler can tell you. You don’t want your best efforts to launch your offerings in a new territory to be noted first as a good laugh. Consider a few unfortunate tries:

• A ramen instant soup: Soup for Sluts—Cheap, Fast and Easy

• A main dish: Meat Muscle Stupid Bean Sprouts

• A snack: Inca Chips—Ethnican Flavor

• A treat: Gelatinous Mutant Coconut Candy

• Some signs: Racist Park (with arrow), Slip and Fall Down Carefully (with Olympic-style icons showing people who weren’t careful), Please Don’t Touch Yourself / Let Us Help You to Try Out / Thanks! (presumably, in a grocery or china store)

• A sticker on a coffee carafe: Be careful of children when inning hot liquids

These blunders happen when entrepreneurs (and even some industry giants and governments) put together messages in English, dictionary in hand but minus quality control. Mistakes can happen in any translation, so get the best translator you can find, preferably local and familiar with your industry. Test the translations he or she produces on potential users or buyers before you commit to producing marketing tools using them. And triple proofread every word and triple check every graphic.

Also, be warned: you can make gaffes and lose face or business even when you share a language with the target country. Just ask any Spaniard who has attempted to market in South American countries, or a French Canadian who wants to sell in France, or any of the English-based entrepreneurs who unknowingly assume their English-based target market speaks and writes exactly as they do.

All of this applies equally to your instructions on packages, brochures, ads, websites and so forth—wherever you connect verbally with your target market. And in that regard, make sure you are fully aware of any obligations to present information in multiple languages. Consumer products’ packages and user manuals across Europe are crammed with mouse-type texts saying the same thing in ALL the languages where they are sold.

Color associations and design considerations

Colors spark feelings and moods, as everyone knows. But the meanings we associate with colors follow culturally specific patterns. As you plan your marketing and packaging materials for a target market, don’t assume that the associations you attach to a color will hold true in your target market. For example, McDonalds had to adjust their marketing campaign in Japan because their mascot, Ronald McDonald, a clown with a painted white face, received a very negative reception there. Painted white faces are associated with death in the Japanese culture. The chart opposite gives you an example of the wildly varying associations that different cultures make for just the color red.

In addition to considering these symbolic associations, pay attention to both the color palette and color combinations that are favored in your target market. For example, a slightly fluorescent cast in colors is popular in some countries, while in others you might see a predominance of brilliant reds, pinks and purples with gold accents.

It’s also important to get a feel for the local design preferences in your sector. Many American entrepreneurs prepare their product presentation materials, meet with a local buyer, and hear the familiar soft rejection, “I love it but it looks too American.” It’s often hard to get the buyer to describe just what that means, but it definitely means the buyer has a solid reason to refuse to buy. If you can, try to partner with such buyers to develop a look that overrides this rejection. Or work with local designers.

Of course, the opposite can be true—think about how US-made blue jeans were prized in communist countries, not that long ago.

The best way to educate yourself about these things is to scout out your competition’s market dress and sales collateral, whether in person or online. Once you get sensitized to these elements, you can decide how much you want to localize colors and design matters in your own materials. The point is to be strategic about it.

Size, use and price patterns

There are other, subtle things you’ll want to check out in your target market. Consider these intriguing examples:

• Japanese apartments and homes are very compact and short on storage space. If you export books that are too big to fit on relatively shallow Japanese book shelves, they will go unsold—not necessarily because they are bad products, or undesirable, but because they simply fall off the shelves, or are too big to even fit in.

• Do-it-yourself tool importers face real challenges in Italy, because so many people live in apartments where a) they do very little DIY and thus don’t dream of a workshop full of shiny tools, and b) they don’t have space to store many tools, even if they are such dreamers.

• Certain over-the-counter medicines, for example aspirin, are sold as quite expensive preparations in some countries, quite unlike the bulk bottles of 100 or 200 tablets you encounter in the US.

• In India, entrepreneurs have made fortunes by repackaging shampoo and similar products in single-use packets and selling them at newsstands and via hand carts. This makes them affordable for huge numbers of people with very low incomes, since they can pay as they go, buying at a low price only when they need the product, vs. investing in a large bottle at a much higher price.

In situations like these, reformatting (printing your books in smaller dimensions), or localizing your product offering (a compact tool box meant for normal household repairs, not DIY projects), or offering what the public expects (small packets of aspirin or personal care items) can open opportunities you might have missed, if you didn’t know about the market dress and consumer preferences in play.

It’s true that the world is shrinking and we all are more aware and accepting of the ways other cultures live and think, and that trend can be a real benefit to your global expansion plans. Just don’t make assumptions about other markets—find out what’s what. You are not obliged to go native, but you do want to be smart.

K.S. and M.R.M.

* The chart above is slightly edited and is included here with permission from its author, Judy Scott-Kemmis. For further details and other colors, visit http://www.empower-yourself-with-color-psychology.com/cultural-color.html