Marketing a product in the country you grew up in is difficult enough. Most people who measure such things say that you only have about a 50% chance of success. Those chances grow quite grim when you are entering another marketer’s home country. But you can even the playing field.

It all starts with managing how you and your team approach the assignment.

When people think about cross-cultural marketing blunders, they usually think of the funny translation gaffs. There are dozens of examples. You’ve probably come across a few of these yourself:

  • Clairol introduced their “Mist Stick” curling iron in Germany only to later find out that “mist” is slang for manure. Not too many people had use for the “manure stick.”
  • Electrolux, the Scandinavian vacuum manufacturer, tried to sell its goods in America with a slogan translated from Swedish that read: “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux.”
  • Pepsi translated its slogan, “The choice of a new generation” for use in Taiwan. Unfortunately, it came out as, “Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead.”
  • Perdue Chicken’s slogan, “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken,” got terribly mangled when that campaign was launched in Mexico. A photo of Frank Perdue with one of his birds appeared on billboards with the Spanish caption, “It takes a hard man to make a chicken aroused.”

While amusing and well-circulated on the Internet, these are not the types of things that ruin brands. These are the small hiccups that occur when executing a campaign in a foreign country. To my knowledge, none of the brands mentioned above suffered any lasting consequences as a direct result of these cultural faux pas.

The mistakes I’d like to address are far less amusing, far more damaging and, for the most part, invisible. They are not oversights so much as decisions that marketing executives make believing they will save time and money. They may seem harmless enough on their own, but together they can steal the wind from your marketing program’s sails and render your brand dead in the water. So before you head off to conquer the world, consider these questions:

1. Is tweaking my domestic marketing plan or ad campaign for international use really an option?

With due respect to Thomas Friedman: The world is not flat. For marketers, it is round and nuanced in ways you cannot possibly anticipate. Your effectiveness in foreign markets is directly related to your understanding of those nuances. Please note that I purposely did not use the word “knowledge.”  Knowledge can be gained by reading reports or Wikipedia articles. Understanding is a different thing altogether. To even approach the understanding level of local competitors and to surpass that of other foreign marketers – you need be there. Attend focus groups, talk to lots of people, walk in the shoes of your target. It is the quickest way to gain a competitive advantage and reduce risk in foreign markets. 

2. Are my own notions of quality hampering my ability to adapt to the local market?

Every consumer wants quality, right?  Right! But the concept of quality is often different from country to country, market to market, and it changes over time with changing needs and options. So what is the right quality for the market you are entering? The first company to figure that out typically wins the most market share and hangs onto it. Some companies, however, operate under the notion that they dictate quality to the market; not the other way around. They are so convinced that they know what is best for the people who buy their product that the idea of actually asking them seems an absurd waste of money. This habit is particularly risky because it flies in the face of one of the very few absolutes that exist in marketing: markets never respond to quality, they only respond to value. And value is subjective, changing and highly influenced by local context. 

3. Is my marketing department set up to execute a cross-border campaign?

Although rarely discussed, internal operations is the silent killer of many cross-border branding efforts. Some companies just aren’t set up for it. That’s why at the outset of any international branding assignment, we conduct an audit of the company’s marketing operations. How are marketing decision made and implemented in the company? Where does the power lie? What personalities are involved? Is it a centralized or decentralized marketing culture?  Are the field offices staffed by sales professionals or marketing professionals? How is the success of the local team measured? The answer to these types of questions will have a direct bearing on your ability to properly execute your brilliant marketing plan in the field. So it’s best to take them into account at the outset.

4. Is my ad agency writing for the market or for the translator?

You invest in professional copywriting services not only to impart facts but to connect with your target on a contextual and emotional level and to motivate them to act. Unfortunately those are the first qualities that are lost in translation. Translators are linguistic experts. They will ensure the accuracy of diction, spelling and grammar, but can’t ensure that the copy will perform its marketing job. That’s why you should not translate. Use professional adaptors instead. Beyond transposing words and grammatical rules from one language to another, adaptation is the rephrasing of concepts and communication strategy from one cultural context to another. And whatever you do, do not ask your agency to produce copy that is “easy to translate.” This gives the appearance of saving you some translation headaches, but is guaranteed to give you a marketing migraine down the line.

These are, in broad strokes, four of the most persistent challenges I have seen my clients deal with when marketing abroad. What are the biggest challenges you see in terms of bringing your brand to foreign markets and what tips or advice have you found useful? Please share in the comments and let’s discuss!

Author: Sean Duffy spent 18 years with ad agencies in Boston, San Francisco, Copenhagen and Stockholm before founding The Duffy Agency in 2001. Sean is President of TAAN Europe and a regular guest lecturer at the Lund University School of Economics. He is also a blogger (www.brandrants.com), Twitterer @BrandRanter and is on LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/seanduffy).

*This post originally appeared on the MENG Online Blog and has been reposted with permission.