The Evolution of Decision Making in Globalization and Localization

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This is part 4 of the “Globalization Motivation” series where I oversimply in order to evangelize globalization, localization, and above all, collaboration.

It’s an exciting time to be a specialist in globalization and localization. There are so many variables to consider when expanding your product or service into new markets around the world. The localization industry is transitioning from a service (reactionary) to a strategic partner (proactive impact on decision making). This is further supported by new trends in project management methodology and teams collaborating to support the overall mission. Work smart, support the mission, and profit.  

Many companies have global missions. How does that mission translate to localization professionals and service providers? This is what I like to call the evolution of decision making and how it has impacted global expansion. It is sometimes difficult to understand why decisions are made by our management and clients and service providers and teams are often tasked with informing WHY we need translate or not to translate, or to completely hyper-localize your content.

ROI 

First, there is the all-important return on investment (ROI). Will our efforts “move the needle”? Does it make sense to expand into a foreign market, translate the text, update the imagery, and even change the user experience? When project managers or producers create their budget and review the available data, they think about how their globalization strategy will impact ROI and be profitable. From a C-level or high-level global perspective that means taking the fully-conceived home country version, mapping out the markets, and deciding what HAS TO change. Ideally, that version has been well thought out and vetted and will be just fine in all other markets. I never worked on a project like that, but it would be an ideal scenario. 

Localization Impacts Versioning

Multiple versions of products, marketing, and packaging adds resources and increases budgets. Localization professionals, clients and service providers often know what would be best received in the local markets and sometimes wonder why they wouldn’t execute the project to be exactly what it SHOULD be? To be profitable, you need to limit your expenses. I think of this as versioning. Versioning equates to additional labor, assets, and money. 

Business Critical Decisions

Historically, something usually has to break to create change. This is what I think of as business critical decision making. To determine the hyper-localization of a product or service, the norm has to be disrupted, usually by a reaction to customer feedback, government restrictions, or legal action. Then there is an uproar when something goes wrong. Executives demand to know “what happened?”, “who was responsible?”, and “how do we prevent that from happening again?” Service providers work on last-minute requests to fix what broke. 

Many companies would say they have a global mission, but that didn’t always mean the localization team would even be involved. It is possible for a product to be available in another country without any adjustments to the imagery, text, or user experience. This is why globalization and localization has been able to live independently in the past and serve as a function way down the supply chain process. All of this changed as business-critical reactions impacted that ever important bottom line. You can properly plan and prevent embarrassment, lawsuits, and budget surprises IF you involve your localization team earlier. 

Branding Decisions

However, over the last five years, we started seeing an increase of what I am calling branding decision making. Companies are standing behind their beliefs and incorporating those beliefs into to their overall brand. Inclusion is a great example of this. Gender, race, age, and ethnicity equality can be part of the messaging. This may not be important to every international market, however, if it’s part of the company’s brand, then it will impact the versioning. Helpful tools to ensure that branding is consistent for localization partners are glossaries, style guides, and buyer personas. The objective here is to have a unified identity for the product or service. 

Consistent branding usually allows a customer to identify a brand with a color, font, or tone. Currently, we are seeing politics play an important role in branding. Before, most companies avoided sharing their beliefs; now more and more companies are taking a stand on very sensitive issues. This can be a great risk and impact return on investment because it may alienate a possible customer. For example, black lives matter may not be relevant to all of your markets, but it may be a consistent message that your brand supports, which will impact your content localization. 

Collaboration Decision Making

The pandemic moved us to a new type of strategic decision making. I’m calling this collaboration decision making. Methodologies promoting collaboration with terminology are being implemented to support the individual objectives of the department or team, and as a result, the overall corporate mission. Marketing and Sales, Engineering and Project Management. Localization and every team they support. A localization team can utilize several strategies to become an effective strategic partner. The result will add localization to the workflow earlier, be included in more key decisions, and no longer be an afterthought late in the process. True collaboration is a strategic partnership.

Here are some great ways to influence that global strategy: 

Evangelization 

The future of localization relies on evangelization. Training, on-boarding, and speaking the language of the decision makers. We can make our case with data, the failures of our competitors, tool integration, and collaboration. I think of this as stakeholder management. This process is ongoing and is not exclusive to a specific product launch or marketing campaign. It instills that localization should NEVER be an afterthought and why it needs to be included in early planning phases. 

Tiering Structure

International markets sit in a tier. Your tier 1 market would be your highest priority market, the following tiers will have lesser importance to the organization. Your data (see below) will be helpful in determining which market should be in what tier. You may hyper-localize for your tier 1 market and perhaps only adjust what you have to for your lowest tiered country. 

Language 

Translation, transcreation, and original in-language copyrighting will directly impact resources because the localization professionals are the subject matter experts. This is of course a high-level view. Exactly how much effort and how many resources need to be applied is often a critical - and sometimes costly - endeavor.

Content Creation 

Language does not live in a silo or in a string. It lives as a “call to action” influencing the customer to move through their buyer’s journey, download, and purchase. Language may also need to be adjusted for the design layout. Images may need to be adapted, re-created, re-filmed, re-photographed, or have text un-imbedded. We have endless possibilities and localization resources are expected to be experts in cultural intelligence and influence the creative.

Local Buyer Personas 

With a lead generation methodology, you have the ability to attract, engage, and delight customers all over the world. Lead generation refers to the different touchpoints a potential customer experiences before they decide to make a purchase. A vital element to this is the buyer persona. These semi-fictional characters change based on the language they speak, culture, political climate, demographics, economics, and ideology. The persona may also use a different social media platform or use a mobile device rather than a desktop. I strongly advocate that localized buyer personas would be a helpful tool to add to your translation management process. I can see so many ways that a language service provider would benefit from this information in a style guide or as a stand-alone resource. 

Data 

Localization teams can bring influential data from the effectiveness of international SEO, to downloads of localized digital campaigns, and ultimately regional profits. Often, unique data analytics that would impact strategic decisions are not be tracked by your domestic teams. You can generate your own reports from your translation management tools, content management system, or whatever your association uses for analytics. 

Integrated Tools

A direct impact on return on investment is efficiency. With the advances in artificial intelligence (AI), such as translation memory and machine translation, it’s now possible to publish localized text directly to your website and use pseudo-translation tools to catch design issues early. Content management software such as Salesforce and HubSpot not only automate tasks but also were created to track multiple touchpoints in the customer journey. Today we are working smarter and saving money.

Improving our integration, whether by collaborating across teams and partners to having an effective technology ecosystem, furthers the argument that localization should be an integral strategic partner. I hope this piece empowers localization management and teams to see where each role - localization project manager, translator, linguist, QA specialist, copywriter, account manager, translation management technology provider, service provider, and marketers - has an influence on the overall brand mission. I want to empower all of my peers to understand how they can be inserted into the global conversation. 

Want to learn more: contact me at erica@haimsconsulting.com