GLOBALIZATION
BUILDING GLOBAL BRAND IDENTITY
No matter which industry you are in or how large your company is, you are inevitably competing in the global market. Even local ice cream shops are facing competition from Italian gelato, Japanese mochi, and frozen yogurt. The first instinct a company has is to create a global brand where positioning, advertising, personality and language strategies are for the most part the same for each global region.
Most companies soon discover this is unrealistic and not very successful. The key to global branding is to capture the unique local psychology with consistent yet diversified approaches. Language is at the heart of the design.
PERSONALIZE YOUR BRAND
Successful global brands capture and convey universal insights that attract customers and inspire employees. Give personality and face to your brand. Language can do miracles.
GLOBALLY LOCAL
Aligning global teams with local teams in your global branding effort is easier said than done. Internal employees often are limited by territory, but have valuable insight within their regions and executive power over their department. External vendors, on the other hand, lack executive power but can navigate beyond the organizational chart in addition to offering an outside perspective and branding expertise. An integrated team is key to your success.
GET LOCAL FEEDBACK, FASTER
Brand is organic, it grows with the fast-changing world. An inspiring global branding message can quickly become stale in a matter of days. How do you survey market feedback? Is your local team and global team listening? What to do after you take in the customers’ feedback? Having a well-defined workflow to update branding content is the first step. By centralizing and streamlining your content strategy, local team and global teams can update brand collateral quickly, without causing any visual and linguistic inconsistency.
CENTRALIZE GLOBALIZATION STRATEGY
Global branding emphasize local flavor, but not deviating from a central message that governs all your local branding efforts. Where can your employees and outside help find these information? Is there a guideline built before the localization effort? What’s the monitoring and surveying protocol? Are you reinforcing the strategy through continuous employee training program and technology adaptation? If not addressed early on, these questions may cost an organization millions of dollars if not more.
