Global Customer Language
Bruno Herrmann, Global Leader, Expert And Advisor
Communicating in the correct Global Customer Language is a business-critical mission that product leaders, content owners, and copywriters all have to deliver on.
This might seem like an easy promise to fulfill, but it comes with an array of underlying international challenges that must be addressed. It’s important to avoid simplistic assumptions to follow the right course of action. Adopt a methodology that allows everyone in the organization to be aligned - and to be enabled
to understand, endorse, and contribute to a holistic global content strategy based on local Effectiveness. This means going beyond words and numbers and walking in the shoes of global customers who want access to products and services where, when, in a way that is relevant to them.
This approach might bring some significant change to the way you approach content creation, localization, and delivery. This article aims to help you define a framework and a set of processes that are actionable enough for you to sell to your wider organization, and simple enough for your internal or external business partners to implement. Let’s start by setting the stage for total Global Content Effectiveness – ensuring local reach, resonance, and reaction.
Linguistic Effectiveness refers to the impact of vocabulary, terminology, and style. It meets accuracy and consistency requirements to make customers comfortable. It enables content to reach them properly. It applies to text and all text-based components ranging from descriptions and taglines to puns and wordplay.
Cultural Effectiveness refers to the impact of values that are collectively and individually embraced. For content to be culturally effective, it needs to be relevant and acceptable so that it engages your customers personally. It enables content to resonate with them. It applies to all visual and audible components of content ranging from images, colors, and icons to music and voice.
Functional Effectiveness refers to the impact of ecosystems that are most natural and familiar. Ecosystems need to be accessible and intuitive to immerse customers in the content environment. Functional Effectiveness makes them (re)act. This applies to all functional components ranging from features and connections to systems and interfaces.
By addressing these three facets, you ensure that your content and products look and work equally well regardless of where in the world your customers are. Strategically, you are becoming customer-centric at a local level – something that is essential to integrate and connect all touch points of customer journeys – both digitally and physically.
Now let’s highlight some concrete actions within the Global Content Effectiveness framework to help you engage and delight local customers in the most personal way.
Use the right semantics: Your language must speak clearly to your customers. What you say has
to convey your messages and thoughts in a way that is as meaningful to your customers as they are
to you, even when you don’t speak the same language. It is crucial to stick to the core of your message
as the baseline for your content strategy. This means that topics related to quality, satisfaction, differentiation, etc. must remain undiluted according to the standards and expectations of local customers. If you keep control of your claims in every market, you are in an excellent position to make your content appealing and memorable, ensuring that your designers and developers do as well.
Use the right style: Your language must speak to the heart of your customers. It must be culturally relevant to resonate and to touch them emotionally. You create and maintain a feeling of familiarity and comfort for them when you use a tone of voice, qualitative syntax, and selection of words that are familiar to them.
This could mean that your 3-word tagline in English-speaking countries (where short is sweet) becomes a paragraph in countries where a more formal approach is required.
Use the right vocabulary and terminology: In any language, and for any market, it is essential to balance standard wording that sounds familiar to customers, with unique wording that makes you stand out from the crowd. Anything that is too generic can lose the immediate attention of your customers. Additionally, certain words and terms - like company or brand names - need to make the same impact in multiple languages and across markets. There are plenty of branding examples around the world, which turned into faux-pas and wasted campaigns such as Nova (“It does not go”) in Spanish-speaking markets or Gerber (“Throw up”) in French-speaking markets. International brand names must be checked and certified, linguistically, and culturally to avoid misunderstanding or offense, whether these names are eventually translated and, localized or not.
Use the right visuals: Customer language is not limited to text. Experiences are primarily based on visual content. The great variety of visual components poses a real challenge and requires careful consideration to avoid an adverse reaction. Some elements are known to be locally and internationally sensitive such as flags, shapes, male/female representation, and body language. A lot of digital content combines visuals features, colors, and layers to create the richest experiences possible using logos, animations, videos, or dashboards. Each one must be checked, as there is no such thing as a small detail.
Use the right ecosystem: The customer language is most powerful in the most comfortable and dynamic ecosystem(s) used by your customers. In a world of omnichannel journeys, language must be tailored and agile enough to remain fluid and customer-centric along the way. This may mean the use of language in a modular way, to fit in each ecosystem with the same level of quality and relevance. For example, some content may have to be prioritized and modified between an application, a platform, and a site. It may also need to be adapted to fit the objective of the property where it resides; consider the language used for a transaction (e.g., e-commerce) versus assistance (e.g., support).
Stay guided by customer understanding and leverage smart data relentlessly and continuously. This is the safest way for you, your team, and your partners to relentlessly deliver content at the right level of linguistic, cultural, and functional intelligence.
About Bruno Herrmann
As a digital leader Bruno Herrmann has more than 20 years of experience in global product, content and customer experience leadership. Most recently he was the Digital Globalization Leader at Nielsen, focusing on global content creation, localization, testing, certification and delivery as well as on product management and international customer experiences.
Before joining Nielsen he managed online globalization programs at HP and content management in addition to Web localization at Compaq. Prior to joining Compaq, he worked in the marketing communications and localization industries, taking part in major international projects for high-profile technology clients.
Bruno Herrmann has been a practitioner, change agent, thought leader and strategist in international information and product management areas, both in the offline and online world. He is a regular speaker, panelist, moderator and workshop leader during events and meetings around the world.