International Marketer’s Blog

Levi’s is promoting its new Work Wear line via a reality TV and online broadcast, in its biggest effort yet to reach the Hispanic market.

The series will follow five young US Hispanics as they journey along the pan-America Highway from Alaska to Argentina. This will culminate in a 10-week reality TV programme to be aired on Discovery en Espanol “The heart of our brand is about pioneering,” said Doug Sweeny, VP of Levi’s brand marketing. “We found that idea really connected with this audience.”

During the series, entitled “Norte a Sur: Una Ruta, 5 Experiencias’, the travellers will stop in 10 cities, contributing to local arts projects.

Levi’s will incorporate research findings on Hispanic youth, such as their fondness for smartphones, blogs and social media, according to the Ad Age report.

“Something cool is that now they’re using technology and social networks to excavate into their past and cultural identity,” said Elizabeth Fauerso, executive director of strategic planning at Dieste, Levi’s Hispanic agency. “They have a stream of salsa music from the 1970s on their Facebook pages.” (more…)

International campaign implementation specialist, Freedman, has launched a consultancy service designed to enable global brands to optimize creative campaigns across channels and across borders.

The new ‘C3 Audit’ service is built around three key pillars: content, culture and creativity. Louie Chow, International Communications Director, explains the idea behind the offering: “In marketing and branding they talk about content, but not about whether it’s creatively or culturally relevant. Content is not useful if it’s not culturally relevant.�

Freedman’s network of senior creatives and implementation specialists across the globe is already helping brands such as IHG, Philips and Shell to deliver better campaigns. The goal of the ‘C3 Audit’ is to give local versions of global campaigns relevance and resonance on a local as well as an international level. At a time when many global brands are taking cost-cutting measures, Freedman’s C3 Audit service offers a much-needed opportunity to use resources more effectively than ever before, reducing overheads as well as ensuring success.

“We can offer an objective approach,â€� says Chow. “If there is a big idea, it can work globally. We are here to discover how.â€� (more…)

International campaign implementation specialist Freedman has launched a bespoke, online translation workflow tool in order to allow its clients to optimize their global campaigns and to allow them to cut out unnecessary layers of work, thereby saving them time and money when implementing campaigns across multiple markets.

iTranslate is part of Freedman’s selection of integrated creative and production solutions – including iPlan, iAdapt, iApprove, and iDeliver – which allow increased efficiencies for clients working on international marketing communications .

iTranslate offers a number of key benefits to clients. According to Chris Scott, Operations Manager, “The whole system is online so all clients need is a web browser. There is no need to worry about different licences as the tool automates manual tasks and communicates directly with translators.�

Using the tool, the majority of work can be done outside of the client’s direct involvement. Once files are complete they convert back to their original format. “It makes the whole process of translation quicker and cheaper,� explains Scott.

Freedman will be working with InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) to integrate the tool with its content management system, allowing for seamless translation and use of web copy across multiple markets. (more…)

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICAAN) – a US-based body governing domains such as .com, .org and .info – has approved a .emarat domain name for the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which will serve as an alternative to the English variant, .ae.

According to Khalid Fattal, Chairman and CEO of the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium (MINC) and a member of ICAAN, a wealth of such initiatives, designed to bolster Arab access to the web, is transforming how Arabic language-only web surfers view the world, commerce and social networking sites.

“This is of paramount importance to more than 350 million Arabs whose native language is Arabic, and 1.5 billion Muslims, who learn the Arabic language for reading the Quran, the vast majority of whom do not know English, and who have been isolated from the English internet phenomenon due to the language barrier of the Internet, and delays in deploying multilingual domains names, IDNs,� he said.

The new .emarat domain name is part of a wider movement across the globe as the hitherto English-language dominated Internet gives way to a new multilingual era. International marketers must keep up-to-date with such developments, in order to ensure that marketing collateral is relevant and that their marketing planning process reflects the reality of today’s world. (more…)

A key research executive has defected from Google China to Baidu, the country’s online search market leader, according to a report in The Financial Times this week.

The move represents the “first ever� switch by a senior Google employee to its local rival, and follows the US group’s decision at the end of last month to move its Chinese web search to its Hong Kong website, where it is not required to self-censor results.

The report says that Google is becoming a “very inconvenient� tool for Chinese-language searches, given that a number of Chinese characters now trigger browser errors – in whichever context they appear.

Web searches on google.com.hk have also suffered disruption by what analysts say is interference from the firewall which filters foreign internet content as it enters China’s telecoms network. There are also reports of moves by other Chinese websites to terminate co-operation with Google.

According to Li Zhi, a search expert at Beijing-based internet research firm, Analysys: “Google’s traffic from users in mainland China has dropped, and its Chinese online search advertising revenues have dropped as well.â€� (more…)

BrandRepublic reported last month that Gap is planning to boost revenues by starting an e-commerce business from a distribution base in the UK, which will serve the UK and other western European countries. Adding to the challenge, Gap is planning to open a store in Milan later this year, the hometown for high end fashion brands. Will Gap be able to find its position in the global fashion capital and rub shoulders with the likes of Armani and Dolce & Gabbana? Will the understated casual style of Gap be appealing to the power dressing Milanese?

Many people think that fashion has become ‘global’. Designer brands run pretty much the identical print ads all over the world. Back in 2004, in the book celebrating the 10th Anniversary of Tom Ford’s reign in Gucci, he wrote ‘We are one culture now. The world drinks Coke, watches the same films, listens to the same music and wants to look the same. When I first came to Gucci, we used to design a different product for the Asian market. Now our customers want the same things – whether in New York, Tokyo or Hong Kong.’

What Mr. Ford didn’t realise is that even though consumers in different countries wear the same clothes, the motivations behind being related to the brand is different. In fact, fashion and beauty is an area that has such intrinsic differences between cultures that global brands often have problems marketing the same product in different countries. (more…)

The Economist’s Technology Quarterly has highlighted the struggle international brands face when expanding their global footprints online. In its report entitled “The many voices of the web,� it highlights the fact that language is very often one of the first stumbling blocks for cross-border businesses entering new markets.

Yet taking short-cuts with language – perhaps in attempt to boost cost-efficiencies within global campaigns – rarely work. Companies need to ensure that they communicate their brand values effectively in new markets, whilst maintaining the consistency and essence of their brand image. And beyond the subtle nuances of language – which necessitate genuinely expert knowledge – brands also need to understand, and respond to, cultural context. For example, in Japan the numbers four and nine are considered unlucky; the words for these numbers sound like ‘death’ and ‘pain.’ No automatic translation service in existence in today’s world can tell you this, as the report makes abundantly clear (more…)

A large part of the costs of adapting international brand campaigns to local country markets can be tied up in translating campaign materials. So this is an area where today’s efficiency focussed international marketers can make significant gains using workflow solutions that eliminate the excess costs of an old school approach to translation.

Often international brands have a full locally managed translation team in each country market they operate in, to ensure that the notion of thinking global, acting local is fully deployed and to deliver the brand message in the most culturally relevant and current way to the local audience.

Inevitably, this approach creates duplication of effort; not so much in the translation itself, which we agree needs to remain as locally nuanced as possible, but in the local control and management of the translation process which can be very hands-on and time consuming. And a locally driven solution leads to locally divergent brand expression. (more…)

Tom Tom, the navigation systems maker has appointed Dutch creative agency Selmore to devise a campaign for a multi-country European marketing push early next year.

Selmore trumped Leo Burnett and FHV/BBDO to win the business.

Tom Tom’s products are currently sold  in 30 countries and translated into 20 languages, though it is not clear whether cross country implementation will be decoupled from the creative shop.

Poppe van Pelt, creative partner at Selmore, said: “Navigation devices are an (more…)