Category Archives: Business globalization

When names collide

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Kobo is the name of an eReader and bookstore that competes with the Amazon Kindle.

Flush with a recent investment, Kobo Inc. has big plans for going global, which, as an author, I’m very happy to see.

Here’s a recent announcement regarding expansion into Australia:

But there is an issue with regards to Australia.

KOBO is the name of a web design firm there, with a web site located at www.kobo.com.au.

They are apparently getting a surge of traffic, as they noted on their home page:

Here we have a small case study on the importance of testing the world readiness of a brand name as early as possible. Granted, most upstart companies don’t have the time or money to hire international lawyers to go out and see if their brand names are available in every market. That said, an hour or two of web searching can go a long way towards avoiding conflicts in the major markets. At the very least, you should see if your domain name is available under select country codes: fr, de, cn, au, ca, etc.

And I’m not trying to pick on Kobo. This is a very common issue. Sometimes you just have to make the best of things. For example, if you visit www.nissan.com, you might think you’re going to the global auto maker’s home page. But you’re not. And Nissan seems to be doing just fine without the coveted .com domain.

Kobo (the ereader) owns both www.kobo.com and www.kobobooks.com but is using kobobooks.com as its primary address. What I suspect happened is that when Kobo decided to go global it realized that “kobo” country code domains were already taken in many markets, so it fell back on kobobooks.

I did a quick search and found that the company owns kobobooks.com.au, kobobooks.de, kobobooks.cn (and probably quite a few more). The web pages don’t exist yet but, if Kobo is successful, they will soon. So that’s the good news. Kobo Books has a path for online global expansion.

And as for the KOBO web design firm, I’d be thinking about how best to monetize all this newfound web traffic.

PS: Perhaps as the world becomes more mobile, more app-oriented, this whole domain issue will become less important. Registrars certainly don’t want to see this happen but there are many frustrated marketing execs who would love to not have to worry about acquiring domains.

 

 

Learning from the not-so-global web sites

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I’ve highlighted the top 25 global web sites in the 2011 Web Globalization Report Card.

Now it’s time to focus on the other end of the spectrum — the 25 web sites that scored most poorly overall. Just as you can learn from the best global web sites, you can also learn what NOT to do by studying various aspects of these 25 sites.

I want to emphasize that the scores these web sites received reflect a unique methodology. Use a different methodology and these 25 sites could very well have been ranked much differently. My methodology evaluates how effectively these web sites have been taken global. Specifically, I look at languages, global consistency, depth and breadth of localization, support for local-language social networking platforms, and user-friendly global navigation.

Here are the 25 lowest-scoring web sites in the 2011 Web Globalization Report Card:

  • Archer Daniels Midland
  • Armani
  • Barclays
  • Budweiser
  • Campbell’s
  • Danone
  • evian
  • Four Seasons
  • Godiva
  • Goldman Sachs
  • Heineken
  • Holland America
  • Home Depot
  • ING
  • J.P. Morgan
  • Johnson & Johnson
  • KitchenAid
  • Kleenex
  • Levi’s
  • Louis Vuitton
  • Maytag
  • McKinsey & Co
  • Santander
  • Thrifty
  • Wal-Mart

From Wal-Mart to Barclays to Louis Vuitton, there are quite a few globally successful companies in this list. What I’m trying to illustrate with this post is that a company can be financially successful, even on a global scale, and still support a web site strategy that is not as efficient nor as user-friendly as it should be.

Here are two brief examples:

McKinsey & Co
There are few consulting firms with a global reputation like McKinsey and yet its global web site leaves much to be desired. For a company that serves clients in so many countries, its site supports just 10 languages (English excluded). One may argue that the company’s reputation speaks for itself, but I’m not sure I buy that argument, particularly when consulting-based organizations such as Deloitte and KPMG support more than 30 languages.

But the greater problem is the lack of localized content. Here is McKinsey’s China page:

Most of the links on this page take users back to English content, without warning. I refer to a site like this as a “local façade” because it does a poor job of managing user expectations. McKinsey recently added a Facebook link — and it links to a Chinese-specific Facebook page. And normally this would be a great feature to include, except that Facebook is largely blocked in China.

Budweiser
Now owned by a InBev, Budweiser is, next to Heineken, one of the most globally successful beers. So why is the web site not so successful?

For starters, there is absolutely no global consistency in web site design or architecture across the country sites. What’s worse, the “age gateway” which is popular among alcohol producers is inconsistent as well. Here’s the .com age gateway:

Let’s assume someone from Mexico visits Budweiser.com and then plods through the age gateway and then somehow finds the link to the Mexico web site (it’s not easy to find). This person is taking to a Mexican age gateway, shown here:

And, for good measure, here is the age gateway for the UK:

I am fully aware that the drinking age varies by country, but does the age gateway need to vary so dramatically as well? And if someone enters an age into the .com site, can’t that age setting be saved should that person migrate to a different country site, thereby bypassing the age gateway? Right now, all I see is a lot of reinventing of the wheel, on a global scale. A lot of resources are simply being wasted, and users are not benefitting.

I want to be clear that I’m not just calling out Budweiser for these flaws. Nearly every global alcoholic beverage, including Heineken, suffers from similar issues. But I call out this issue because it’s such a resource drain on companies and web teams. To effectively take a web site or application global, you need a consistent platform. If it worked for Facebook, there’s no reason it can’t work for most web sites.

Finally, it’s always important to keep in mind that translation alone does not make a web site global. The 25 sites here averaged support for 10 languages, which is is well below the average of 23. But language accounts for just 25% of a site’s score. There were a number of sites with fewer than 10 languages that scored in the top 100 overall — such as Dow Corning and Renesas. And there were a number of sites in this group of 25 that support more than 10 languages, like ING, with support for 24 languages.

Link: Web Globalization Report Card

Byte Level Books is looking for authors

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Byte Level Books logo

I’m pleased to announce the formation of a new publishing imprint dedicated to “books with a world view.”

To date, we’re published two books — The Savvy Client’s Guide to Translation Agencies and The Art of the Global Gateway. These books are now available in print and digital format on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. And they will soon be available through the Apple iBookstore.

We began with in-house titles (that is, titles by yours truly) so we could focus on developing a production process that supported both print and digital books. Now that we’ve ironed out the production kinks, we want to start taking on new authors.

Here are some of the areas we are most interested in:

  • Global web and mobile design insights
  • Country and cultural insights
  • How-to guides on the internationalization and localization of software and mobile apps
  • Translator tips and best practices
  • Essays on language and globalization

If you are an expert in any of these areas and you’d like to share your ideas with the world, we’d love to hear from you.

You can learn more, and submit a proposal, at www.bytelevelbooks.com.

Walking through jelly

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Just because a global company mandates one “global” language doesn’t mean that everything will run smoothly.

English is typically the global language selected, which is nice for those who were born into it. But for most everyone else, it can be a struggle if not a drag on one’s career prospects.

Which is why I was struck by this Harvard Business Review article on cross-cultural communication.

Here’s an overview of the study:

In an ethnographic study comprised of interviews and concurrent observations of 145 globally distributed members of nine project teams of an organization, we found that uneven proficiency in English, the lingua franca, disrupted collaboration for both native and non-native speakers. Although all team members spoke English, different levels of fluency contributed to tensions on these teams. As non-native English speakers attempted to counter the apprehension they felt when having to speak English and native English speakers fought against feeling excluded and devalued, a cycle of negative emotion ensued and disrupted interpersonal relationships on these teams.

In other words, varying degrees of English fluency disrupted the ability of teams to function well, not just across borders but within meetings.

I’ve witnessed this problem firsthand. In some cases I was the non-native speaker struggling to get a point across. In other cases I watched non-native speakers keep their mouths shut in meetings for fear of saying the wrong thing or because they couldn’t keep up with the conversation.

One non-native German speaker referred to the struggle keeping up in German-only meetings as “walking through jelly.”

Language fluency will probably always been unevenly distributed across global companies. But one thing I would love to see more companies do is incentivize employees to learn a second (or third or fourth) language. Many native-English speakers are simply oblivious to the challenges that non-native speakers face. By pushing everyone into that uncomfortable zone of learning a new language, we all gain a degree of empathy. It’s not about becoming fluent in another language; it’s about becoming a more empathetic person.