This month, Campaign magazine published its second Going Global supplement. A number of experts in the field of branding gave us their thoughts on the issues that face those tasked with international branding. One of those experts was B2B International’s very own Paul Hague, who provided some advice for business-to-business marketers taking their promotions to a global audience:

We have all heard of communication gaffes made by regionally focused consumer companies as they attack a wider market. If Rolls-Royce had gone ahead with the branding of their Silver Mist car in Germany, it would have found it was trying to sell Silver Sh*t. Such cultural and linguistic differences are a marketer’s nightmare and they indicate the importance of using research to understand the difference between customers throughout the world.

HSBC has made an effective campaign out of the way different people see the world. In a long-running and highly recognisable series of adverts (particularly noticeable in international airports), they humorously provide examples of how people’s interpretation of the same objects can be vastly different depending on their culture, heritage, education, etc. They demonstrate, if you like, how one man’s meat can be another man’s poison.

All the while, business-to-business marketers have been sitting on the sidelines. They do not have the huge marketing budgets that are required for global campaigns. In fact, $200,000 is likely to be a respectable budget for many an industrial company or division aiming at an international market. With such meagre funds to play with, their communication efforts have been much more targeted and therefore less visible for us to examine and critique.

With an emphasis on below-the-line advertising, business-to-business marketers have focused on anything that gets them close to shaking hands with a potential customer. High on the list are exhibitions, brochures and technical sheets translated into local languages, and, if you’re lucky, a website on which you may just have one or two language options. There is very little attempt made to understand the local culture and to design a promotional campaign that meets local needs.

If marketing budgets are really so small for business-to-business marketers, it may be hard to imagine how they could afford to spend $100,000 on a market research campaign aimed at testing different communications and finding out what works over a wide geographical area. Mind you, the investment in research to establish the principles of what works pays dividends – not only on the current campaign but on all future campaigns.

I encountered a good example a couple of years ago during the concept testing of an advert. Of the seven adverts being tested, the design agency had a clear favourite – a nicely designed ad showing two futuristic-looking heads. However, in what was a huge disappointment to the agency, this particular ad bombed dramatically when tested against the six others among an international group of target customers. Existing and potential customers actually found the ad confusing and felt it portrayed the company as two-faced. Adverts that tested much better were less stylish but they featured the product, or the product plus a person.

A good test for any b2b marketer is to lay out their promotions in front of customers and prospective customers, and ask the following questions:

• What are first reactions to the promotions?
• What are the key things that jump out of the promotions?
• What are the promotions saying to you?
• How would you rate the clarity of the message(s)?
• What are the benefits that are communicated by the promotions?
• How important are these benefits to you?
• How effective are the promotions in terms of being compelling (“stop-ability”), relevance, links to the positioning of the advertiser, and clarity?
• How successful are the promotions in “calling the customer to action”?
• Do respondents think anything is missing from the promotions?
• How clear is it what people should do next, having seen the advert (i.e. how effective are the response mechanisms and instructions)?

Market research isn’t the only measure that can be used to test the effectiveness of promotions. Additional indicators can be quite simple, such as:

• The correlation between the sales of a product and a promotional campaign. However, the long lead times in business-to-business markets seldom show strong links between the two.
• Response mechanisms built into adverts or literature that over time provide feedback on the effectiveness of campaigns.
• Orders taken on an exhibition stand (or, more simply, the number of business cards collected on the stand).
• Feedback to the sales team (and order takers) that a promotion has been seen.

In conclusion, here’s a checklist of questions that business-to-business marketers should consider when addressing global markets:

1. Start with the views of locals – no one knows or understands the market better and their views are always worth listening to. However, be prepared to experiment and be bold, because the best promotions are those that break the mould.
2. Promotions are most effective if they have a single, purposeful proposition. Many promotions are overloaded with too many propositions or they are too clever by half.
3. Promotions that look authoritative, even editorial in style, will be eagerly read by a technical audience.
4. Technicians love facts. Give them loads of them.
5. The product may be boring to some people but it isn’t to the person who is buying or specifying it. Show them the product.
6. Promotions that feature someone from the company are far more believable than those that use actors.
7. People will give a fraction of a second to a promotion (a blink) as they make up their mind whether it is for them or not. Catch their attention with images and visuals at the top of the ad and use them boldly. Use them to draw people into the promotion.
8. Make sure that the images are relevant otherwise the audience will quickly move on. The closer the relevance of the images to the industry and the text, the better.
9. The headline of any promotion needs to be strong and powerful. Many headlines fail by being too long, too complicated or irrelevant. The headline should follow the visual or lead at the top of the ad.
10. When developing a campaign, give it “legs”. Wherever possible, create a connection with parallel or previous campaigns so that there is a link that provides continuity for the audience.

Hot on the heels of the ESOMAR Global Market Research report, the Market Research Society’s most recent survey of the profession reveals that the UK industry fared comparatively well in 2008. However, 2009 has brought its own challenges that may compromise industry growth this year.

In the face of a grim global economic outlook, total UK market research agency revenue grew by 6.2% in 2008 according to the MRS, as compared with global growth of just 4.5% (reported here). This was driven, in large part, by international growth with international revenues jumping by 12.5% compared to 2007.

In Marketing Magazine’s latest market research league table, B2B International’s performance has outstripped this industry average, with a 24% rise in year-on-year turnover seen in 2008.

In their analysis of the results, Marketing magazine point to 2009 being the year when the recession truly begins to bite for the market research industry. Curtailed client budgets, increased consolidation within the sector, rising research demands and downward cost pressure are all cited as key challenges that agencies must address if they are to truly weather the ongoing storm.

Client-side, anecdotal evidence appears to suggest that the most pressing need from research partners is data that can truly influence, rather than merely support, business decisions. At B2B International, we’d like to think that this overarching aim is central to our ethos – To deliver “market research with intelligence”.

To learn more about B2B International’s range of market research and consultancy services, please click here.

Following yesterdays post on ‘Market Research In A Recession’ is today’s post detailing the seven steps to minimize the impact of reduced market research spending. These steps from John Quelch (a professor at Harvard Business School) confirm a lot of what we have learnt in business to business markets over the last few months:

1. Stay focused. Savvy marketers focus their research on the products, brands, and markets that are key to their marketing strategy. In a recession, it’s essential to get a clear read on existing core customers, including those who are most loyal to the brand and those who are most profitable, rather than fritter away research resources on potential or peripheral customers. When times are good, there is budget available for increased research on secondary products or customers. Now, nice-to-knows that are not essential will have to wait.
2. Enlist trusted research partners. Marketers and research suppliers who trust each other and have established long-term relationships can jointly plan how to extract more insights and make better decisions based on fewer expenditures. For example, combining data sets may reveal new leading indicators of changes in customer behavior. Tracking studies may have an edge over one-off projects. CMOs who trim costs by consolidating their budgets with an integrated research supplier should insist that the supplier aggressively explore synergies across its various component agencies as well as eliminate research redundancies.
3. Value experience and judgment. CMOs should tap the knowledge and intuitions of managers and researchers who’ve lived through previous recessions. In setting prices, for example, such insight can help calibrate the optimal level of price promotion offers. Experience also reveals proxies: in tough times, some marketers use research results from Sweden as a proxy for Scandinavia, rather than conducting the same research in all Scandinavian countries.
4. Seize opportunities overseas. Some large multinational marketers, such as Unilever, are shifting market research expenditures away from Western Europe and toward emerging markets in Asia and Latin America. Relative to the developed economies, the costs of research in emerging economies are less and the payoff from incremental insight can often be greater. Brand preferences and consumption levels in emerging markets such as China, India and Brazil tend to be more fluid. Customer research is therefore critical to aid marketers trying to cement brand preferences early on as these economies develop.
5. Use online market research with a dash of skepticism. Online research is cheap, fast, and the wave of the future. Tools like SurveyMonkey allow non-expert users to create custom surveys in minutes. As an alternative to offline focus groups, custom online panels  can be formed for qualitative research on new product ideas or new ads. Taking the do-it-yourself approach rather than outsourcing to a market research firm is attractive in a cost-cutting era, but you risk getting no more than what you pay for. The opinions of convenience sample of an enthusiastic online brand community may not represent all users.
6. Don’t cut market research across the board. Just as important as knowing where to cut research is knowing where not to cut. When marketers are creating fewer new ads and introducing fewer new products, it is doubly important to use rigorous pretesting to select the strongest alternatives. In categories where the bases for customers’ value judgments are changing, modest expenditures on copy research can prevent blowing much more money on ineffective messaging. Adding a few questions to standard tracking studies is a low-cost way to shed light on changes in customer attitudes and purchase behavior. For key products, running conjoint studies to check on shifts in price elasticities of demand and price-attribute tradeoffs can usefully improve the profitability of pricing decisions at a time when cash is king.
7. Keep an eye on the new customer. No one has a perfect record of predicting the future, and the recession is making it harder for customers to envision or articulate their needs. Even so, and despite budget pressures, smart marketers devote a portion of their market research to getting a handle on future changes in customer behavior. Are customers of your brand going to revert to previous consumption patterns when the recession ends? Or are they developing coping mechanisms that will endure, especially if the recession is lengthy? What new products and services will customers be open to embracing? If, as in the financial services category, customer confidence and trust in brands have been seriously eroded, how long and what steps will it take to regain them? Eventually, the recession will end, and future success depends on being well-positioned, based on sound research, when it does.

To view the latest marketing strategies of large multi-national corporates in a recession, click here.

Original article viewed at http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/

In his latest Thursday Night Insight post, Matt Powell reflects on his experiences working in our China office and the difficulties inherent in conducting business across cultural boundaries.

I recently saw a TV advert from one of the world’s major banks that professes to its excellent local knowledge in every single country.  Of course, this campaign has been going for quite some time now as the bank positions itself not as a sprawling, faceless mega-corporation, but indeed as a very localised and personal bank.  Whether or not the bank does in fact deliver upon its promise remains to be seen, but the importance of local knowledge cannot be underestimated.

There are many horror stories about corporations naively taking one product or brand that is successful in one country and launching it into a foreign market without first adapting the product or its branding to meet the local culture.  Pepsi and Coca-Cola give two sterling examples of ‘how not to do it’.

When Pepsi launched their cola in China, the company thought it would be sufficient to translate their slogan "Pepsi Brings You Back to Life" into Chinese and simply launch the product.  Unfortunately, the slogan was translated a tad too literally and instead proclaimed that "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave."  Of course, the problem was rectified, but damage had already been done. 

Coca-Cola did something fairly similar when launching their product in China; they chose to launch their brand using Chinese characters that read phonetically as “Kekoukela”.  Of course, the phonetic spelling sounded similar ‘Coca-Cola’ to a westerner, but I imagine there weren’t many Chinese consumers looking to purchase a refreshing can of “female horse stuffed with wax”.  Surely, even just the smallest foray into market research would have highlighted these significant blunders, and saved the companies millions of dollars – let alone the damage done to the brands.  

Indeed, in many cases, the same message or piece of information can still cross hazy lingual and cultural boundaries.  I myself had an experience when on secondment in our Beijing office, where lingual barriers became slightly hazy to say the least.  Each day when finishing work I would order a taxi to where I lived, pronounced ‘Hua Mao’.  Every time I asked, the taxi driver would either laugh, shake his head, ask to see a map, or (in one extreme case) make a loud cat-like ‘miaow’-ing noise at me.  I knew I was saying the name of the location correctly, so although slightly perplexed at the behavior of the Beijing taxi drivers, I thought nothing of it… until, that is, one day towards the end of my stay when I took a taxi with some of my Chinese colleagues.  When I asked the taxi driver to me to my destination my colleagues burst into uproarious laughter – it turned out that for two months I had been saying the words correctly, but pronouncing them with the wrong tonal inflection – and, of course, was asking the taxi driver to take me to ‘cat with flowers’.  At least the miaow-ing taxi driver seemed slightly less disturbing after that.

Although it is an amusing story, it does indeed highlight the importance of local knowledge and just how critical the nuances of any language and culture really are.  To most westerners, what I was saying and what I should have been saying sounded fairly similar indeed, but (despite me always managing to get to my destination) the difference it made to the local person – the person who mattered – was huge.   

At B2B International we, like the large bank, recognise just how important local knowledge is.  Every country is different and brings with it a whole set of language issues and cultural traits.  We use ‘mother-tongue’ interviewers when conducting international interviews for this very reason; the cultural nuances are critically important in understanding information and indeed any subtle inferences that may be missed by someone who is not completely immersed in that particular culture or language.  Indeed, across our three offices we can span the globe from Asia, to Europe, to the Americas.

Our expertise can help our clients in many ways – from conducting multi-country studies in various languages, to conducting in-depth research and analysis in specific countries, to researching new markets to enter.  For more information about how we could help your Company, contact a member of research team at our European headquarters in Manchester, our Asian headquarters in Beijing, or our American head office in New York.