The goal of any company or brand is to create a seamless customer experience across a wide variety of touchpoints, channels and platforms. While traditional customer experience management (CEM) tools are effective in managing this customer experience across new channels and platforms (both online and offline), the increasing globalisation of brands poses a difficult question for marketers: how do you create a seamless customer experience across different global markets?
The global customer experience
Answering this question means recognising the unique issues and challenges that arise when brands begin to acquire a global reach and marketing campaigns go international. Companies must stay in tune with the needs of their customers, regardless of their geographic location, and must take steps to ensure their international marketing campaigns properly reflect the needs of customers in overseas markets.
Remember, putting the customer at the heart of the business is the central tenet of marketing. This means creating products and services that are rooted in the needs of the customer rather than the need of the company to sell its products. This is especially important in a global context, where the needs of the customer can change very quickly the further you move geographically from your home market.
Thus, a global campaign means more work to accommodate wider diversity, especially culturally and linguistically. This is already complex, but by adding the complexity of languages, it becomes a very difficult process to manage. Certain words may carry a certain connotation or meaning in one culture that’s not present in another.
Cultural sensitivities and local nuances are complex – there’s the obvious question of casting, locations, styling and messaging that will work at least regionally, if not globally. Promoting a brand in Brazil is obviously very different from promoting a brand in a place like Sweden, but there are certain ideals, principles and values that are universal.
Moreover, marketers must consider the wider question of target audience. How much crossover is there between a home audience you know intimately and your audience in other countries? How much overlap is there in lifestyle, values, attitudes and aspirations?
Following the best practices of CEM, it’s important to deliver locally relevant experiences on a consistent basis. It’s also important to coordinate efforts globally. This means sharing knowledge and learning about customer preferences and behaviours in different overseas markets, as well as ensuring that certain global standards and practices are maintained.
5 key success factors
With that in mind, there are five key success factors that will help you create a seamless customer experience across different global markets:
1. Team
Have a central brand management team that can oversee all countries. This makes it much easier to deliver locally relevant experiences on a consistent basis. This centralised team will understand what works – and what doesn’t work – across different regions and countries, and be able to share these best practices with the local marketing team.
2. Timing
Dedicate the proper attention to timing and planning. Good central planning will ensure you have enough time for proper review and ensure consistency across markets. Often, in the rush to roll out marketing campaigns by a certain deadline, not enough time and attention is paid to all the details of a specific campaign asset, such as a paid media spot.
3. Simplicity
Devise a single overarching idea, value proposition or asset that is easily and simply translatable across all markets. In terms of a single, overarching idea, it might be something like ‘affordable luxury’ or ‘ultimate performance’. In terms of a single asset, it might be a specific video that highlights what your brand is all about in less than two minutes.
4. Technology
Leverage technology to extend your global reach and ensure easy access to niche geographic markets. Getting it right across markets is the key to building global brand equity. Remember, the goal is a seamless customer experience, and this is where mobile technology – i.e. tablets and smartphones – can help to build links between the online and offline. Customers who interact with your brand online should have the same type of experience when they visit your shop or retail location offline.
5. Embrace cultural differences
There are cultural differences, but it’s possible to embrace them and use them to improve the impact of marketing communications. B2B brands should adopt the mantra ‘think global, act local’, which means adapting global strategies to meet the needs of locating marketing initiatives. For example, take the basic concept of ‘luxury’. In Western markets, luxury may imply a certain type of lifestyle, whereas in developing or emerging markets, luxury may relate to the possession of certain goods that are not widely accessible.
By keeping in mind these five success factors, you will be able to deliver locally relevant experiences while coordinating efforts globally. Furthermore, you will be able to institutionalise learning globally in order to ensure that global standards and practices are maintained. A marketing team traveling from London or Berlin to Tokyo or Shanghai should not feel that a brand’s message and positioning has been fundamentally altered.
Summary
For any brand that already has an international audience – or that is thinking of going international – it is absolutely imperative to get the customer experience right. In order for this experience to become seamless, a customer moving between North America, Europe and Asia must see the same core values and ideas associated with the brand. The precise message and the people used to convey that message might change, but the overarching idea of the brand must not. That’s the key to building a global brand.
Most importantly, a seamless customer experience across global markets ensures the highest possible ROI for your marketing efforts. You can think of this as getting the most value for your marketing dollars. Since so many different elements of your marketing strategy can now be deployed across borders, it means that you don’t have to start from scratch every time you enter a new market. This simplifies the process of extending your products geographically and transforming your brand into one that’s truly global.