Brands such as Pizza Hut and eBay have leveraged on mobile applications to successfully grow their businesses by leaps and bounds.

Pizza Hut’s iPhone application generated US$1 million of sales within three months of its launch, m.eBay.com drove US$380 million worth of purchases in 2009. People not only bought books and clothes from eBay but also a Lamborghini, a US$150,000 boat, and a Bentley.

With the many advantages they have over traditional channels, they have changed the way business is conducted

Being at the right place at the right time
Mobile applications such as iPhone apps are right there for you whenever you want to buy something, according to Steve Yankovich, Vice President of Platform Business Solutions and mobile at eBay: “When you have a moment to buy something, where are you and what screen do you have? The whole premise behind mobile commerce is buying during downtimes, such as when you are waiting for a table at a restaurant, between action at your kids’ soccer games, sitting in front of the tube (train) anywhere, anytime. When a customer thinks about a purchase, she can pull the trigger at that moment.”

Being an integral part of one’s daily lives
When a mobile application offers information or tools that make people’s lives easier and more convenient, it becomes part of their daily lives. It might even become indispensable to them one day. The customer loyalty you can build through a mobile application is invaluable.

A good example is the highly functional VaxTrax, an iPhone app by pharmaceutical giant Novartis to help families manage their children’s vaccination schedules. The app tracks vaccinations as they are received, from infancy through adolescence, then tells parents when updates are due. Users can also use the app to log insurance records, and find pharmacies or other locations where flu shots are available.

Using of locational based technology to customize preferences
GPS on mobile phones enables people to identify products and services close to them. Mobile apps will not only allow your business to attract more customers but also to entice them to spend more. Other than a store locator, Kraft’s iFood Assistant contains 7,000 delicious recipes and full-meal shopping lists. With more ideas on how to prepare and economize their meals, this app has succeeded in driving more sales for Kraft.

Furthermore, mobile users can share information easily with their family, friends and even strangers on the internet with a few touches.

Word-of Mouth Recommendations
It is easier to get word-of-mouth recommendations on apps than other channels. For instance, most location-based apps for restaurants and service establishments have a review section. Those with good reviews have undoubtedly attracted more customers to visit them, especially since the potential customers looking for their services are only a street or two away.

Live real time updates
Due to their accessibility, mobile apps are especially suitable for price-sensitive businesses. Mark Beccue, an analyst at ABI Research, praised eBay’s strategic use of mobile commerce: “EBay customers are adamant and very enthusiastic, and the only way to keep up with auctions anytime, anywhere is mobile. Enabling people to keep up with their auctions in real time through untethered commerce was a very clever move by eBay.”

For the same reasons, mobile apps can be used to push promotions and discounts. Customers can be informed almost immediately when these go “live”. They can also react instantly on purchase decisions, without having to drive to a store or switch on a computer. In this way, they are better able to take advantage of any offers that have been made to them.

Deeper customer engagement
Deeper customer engagement can be achieved when apps make things fun for your customers. As can be seen from the clip below, ordering from Pizza Hut through its iPhone app is a highly interactive experience:

Pizza Hut’s iPhone app even comes with a highly addictive game. With its ‘cool’ factor, it is no wonder 100,000 downloads of the app were made within 2 weeks of its launch.

How can public relations add value to your business in a new country? Let us examine the ways:

Credibility Building
In a foreign market, you are inevitably competing against more established rivals at the beginning. It makes no difference whether your company is larger or more sophisticated in your home country or globally. The other brands are known and trusted here. Yours is not. Thus, there is a greater need to build on your credibility in a new country.

Through public relations, you can position company executives as experts in your field and attract media attention. When your company is quoted in published articles, people will see it as possessing the know-how to meet their needs. The same applies when your company executives speak at an industry conference or participate in panel discussions at these events. Your company would not be given the opportunity to enjoy such a high profile at the conference unless it is seen as a credible player in the industry by the organizer.

Applying for local awards also builds prestige for your company if it wins or earns recognition as a finalist. Many trade journals, government agencies, and professional associations sponsor annual “best of” award programs. In fact, winning a local award within the first year is one of the best ways to penetrate a market. Nothing excites people more about a product or service, or gets them to try it out, than when it is recognized by others as both novel and effective.

Educating Potential Customers
In a foreign market, the benefits of your products and services may not be as readily apparent due to different lifestyles, habits, common practices etc. A newspaper ad or TV commercial will only have enough space/time to list these benefits. Public Relations goes beyond this to explain them in detail. Through media interviews and article placements, the company can present facts, figures and scientific studies to educate potential clients on the superiority of their products and services. Interest can further be generated around the latest studies or trends to highlight the urgency of resolving or preparing for certain problems through the use of your company’s product or service.

If your product or service is the first of its kind in this market, it is not only important to interest potential customers in them but also to teach them how to use and incorporate them into their lifestyle or current practices. In such cases, a more lengthy PR campaign is necessary because more customer guidance and support is required.

Forging Relationships
Your company will have to build business relationships from scratch when you enter a foreign market. In addition to customers, this extends to the media and stakeholders like the regulatory authority, industry associations etc. To this end, your company might want to consider newsletters or blogs to engage the different groups of audiences on a continual basis. Participation in industry or community events is another avenue, along with the organization of special events. Examples of the latter include client parties, charity fund-raisers, open-house visits to your factory and public celebrations of company milestones such as your firm’s anniversary.

Attracting Investors and Partners
Business expansion is always a costly undertaking. To attract investors and franchisees in a foreign market, it is imperative that your company is seen as solid with strong profitability potential. By presenting your company as an authority quoted by the media and invited by the industry for speaking engagements, you show potential backers you are well-endorsed and supported by independent parties. Better yet, an ongoing public relations campaign helps your company craft an image as a long-term player in your business, rather than someone who is testing the waters and may not stick around. Investors like to see this type of commitment.

Public Relations may be an effective tool in your market penetration strategy. But how do you build on current public relations efforts when you expand your operations into another country? Follow this blog for the next article in this series.

Now that the internet has become a permanent fixture of modern life, companies can no longer market their products and services in the same way as they used to. The internet has changed how information is received and how people expect to communicate with other individuals and groups. It follows that the way that promotional messages are disseminated has to adapt accordingly.

To start with, information flow is no longer one way. We are no longer passive recipients of advertisements and other marketing materials. If we do not like a product or service, we can inform the whole world through the World Wide Web. Instead of telling people what to expect or prefer, companies now have to interact with potential customers and respond to them.

Therefore, new tactics have to be deployed to ensure your company is reaching out effectively to its target market.

Personal Communication
On the Internet, people want to talk to another person, not a company. Marriott CEO Bill Marriott has an entertaining blog in which he posts regular updates and stories from his travels to Marriott properties around the world.

IBM did not create just one blog. The company created an entire network of blogs by getting its employees to write about what interests them, what they are working on and any other random topic. In this way, IBM provided insight on what happens behind the scene by picking the brains of its employees. Consumers were not only able to feel more involved with the company, they were also given a direct connection with IBM employees. In turn, the employees were able to feel the importance and relevancy of their work and to understand what customers want and value.

Transparency
With direct and personal access to company personnel come expectations of transparency. If consumers are connecting to real people, they also want the real story, not some marketing speak manufactured for them.

Sun Microsoft CEO, Jonathan Schwartz has a blog that receives 400,000 hits a month. One of the reasons why it was successful was because it was open. Negative comments are allowed along with positive ones. Even the most inane ones were approved. The transparency shown by Schwartz built trust among visitors of his blog and they responded by becoming loyal followers.

Ford was able to leverage on transparency on social media to avert a potential public relations disaster. When the company’s legal department sent out letters to forum owners to request them to stop using Ford trademarks in the materials posted on their website, it caused misunderstandings and ill-feelings towards the company. Fortunately, Ford’s Community Manager Scott Monty was quick to detect these sentiments and manage the issues. He presented Ford’s side of the story and let everyone know what was happening every step of the way as agreements and compromises were ironed out.  Despite the internal gaffe, Monty was able to rally the online community around Ford rather than against it.

Showing You Care
Starbucks showed that its customers truly know best with its My Starbucks Idea website.

Suggestions can be submitted to this website for voting by Starbucks consumers. The most popular ones are reviewed by the staff. This is an idea that almost every company has. But Starbucks introduced a fresh spin to it by adding an “Ideas in Action” blog that provides updates on the status of the changes suggested. The blog showed that Starbucks recognized how savvy their consumers are. It exemplified the company’s commitment to continual innovation and to delivering what their customers want.

Comcast was able to show their customers how much they matter through their @comcastcares Twitter account. Run by the affable Bill Gerth instead of a nameless faceless customer service rep, the account provides help and advice to users in need. What Comcast does particularly well is the way it manages customer dissatisfaction through Twitter. Complain about the company and you can be sure you will hear from Gerth and his team immediately, and with warmth and empathy. The comcastcares team presents itself not as a company, but friends who exchange messages regularly with other Twitter users, sometimes with details of their personal life.

People not Products
With the shift from the impersonal to the personal, communications now have to be built around people rather than products. Companies are becoming increasingly sophisticated in engaging and adding value to customers through online communities.  On top of a variety of social media platforms, Dell has an island in Second Life. Through the HSBC Business Network, HSBC put entrepreneurs in touch with each other via blogs, videos and online forums.

Making It Fun and Interesting
Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?” series on Youtube is legendary. In these videos, the CEO Tom Dickson attempts to blend all kinds of objects in the food processors the company sells. With the fresh and original idea behind the campaign, the low cost videos were a huge hit. They eventually led to a five-fold increase in sales.

At the end of the day, branding is all about creating and maintaining a consistent feeling of familiarity, trust, reliability and confidence with the targeted public. With the paradigm shift in how people use and interact with technology, the rules on how to nurture these feelings have also changed. Will your company be a winner or loser in the Social Media Age? It all depends on how well you continue to engage your customers in your branding.

The rise of globalization opens up more markets and opportunities. On the flipside, it establishes the pressing need to speak in your customers’ language to get their attention amidst the clutter of ads. Presenting a localized set of marketing collaterals to your prospects or customers has become almost mandatory in today’s marketplace.

It is important to ensure your marketing materials are designed with localization in mind during the conceptualizing stage, so that the same marketing brochure can be localized swiftly and effectively thereafter. Otherwise, more time and effort will be spent on re-creation of the design or localization process, making little economic sense.

Here are five quick tips you can utilize in the creation of marketing brochures intended for localization, without compromising on your corporate identity in the long run.

1. Space matters
Chinese and English are generally more compact in text length. Thus, the translation derived from these languages will often be longer than the source text. Translations may also end up longer because translators sometimes use more words to describe and bring out the nuances and meaning.

The rule of thumb is: Set aside 40% of extra space in your brochure design for the translated content which may take up more text space. You would not want your typesetter to take drastic measures like adding new pages, re-positioning the images, adjusting the line spacing or reducing the font sizes and diverting away from your corporate branding guidelines.

2. Avoid having narrow columns
The Thai language does not use punctuation and has no spaces between words. Breaks only occur between sentences. If you have narrow columns for languages like Thai, Tamil and Burmese, you risk cutting the sentence and conveying a different meaning should the line breaks be made inappropriately.

Languages like Hungarian, Finnish and German use single long words to represent a sequence of shorter words in other languages. For instance, the English phrase “user information for using the escalator” may be translated as “rolltreppenbenutzungshinweise” in German. Having several long words will pose a challenge for layouts with narrow columns. A text with numerous hyphens is also not aesthetically pleasing.

3. Do not capitalize on capitalization
In alphabets with a case distinction i.e. upper case and lower case letters are used, capitalization can be used in the design to emphasize a point. However, it would not work for languages like Arabic, Hebrew, Korean and Japanese which do not use the Roman alphabet. Similarly, the first letters of all German nouns are capitalized so capitalizing German words will not make much of an impact.

Italicizing is not recommended in Asian languages like Korean and Japanese as it may not look pleasing to the eye. Alternatively, you may want to consider BOLDING certain words or use a stronger font colour to highlight the important phrases and points.

4. Avoid country specific information
Different countries have different preferences and formats for presenting dates, addresses, numbers and other figures. For instance, decimal separators are used differently in different locales. Three million dollars is symbolized in different ways as illustrated in the table below.

As shown in the table below, Japanese and Thai are examples of two cultures where the dates are expressed in significantly different ways from the English format.

Japan employs the Heisei date system. The year 2000, which is the 12^th year of the current emperor’s reign is expressed as “Heisei 12”. Thais adopt the Buddhist calendar way of expressing the date, denoting the year 2000 as “2543”.

We may be familiar with using 8/9 to indicate a date. However, this may prove confusing. It could mean 8^th September or 9^th August, depending on different culture conventions.

That is why for the main body content, it is best to spell out entire words and avoid the use of abbreviations. A one-size fits all approach is hardly applicable in this respect.

5. Support from design applications and fonts
If you intend to utilize in-house resources for design and typesetting of the foreign languages, you have to ensure your design application supports the languages you require for localization. Old programs like Freehand might not support other languages well.

Some languages like Arabic, Hebrew and Urdu read from right-to-left. If you are localizing into these languages, you have to make sure that the software you use can support these languages too.

It is also advisable to research on the font choices when creating the design template. Select fonts that support special characters as some fancy font families do not have this function. If you want to gauge the final design in a foreign language, you can test it out by pasting dummy text (with your selected font and font size) which can be easily obtained by going to websites in that language.

While these guidelines can get you started with localization, you might want to consider working alongside an experienced global content management and localization company instead of mitigating problems later on, which often proves to be costly.

A well-established global content management and localization partner can fully understand your content and localization needs, proactively identify potential issues and provide efficient, cost-effective solutions.

This article brings you up to speed with 8 excellent reasons.

1 ‐ Foreign markets are golden gooses in the making
Research carried out by Nielsen Netratings  described  foreign  internet  markets  as  “low-hanging fruit,” that is, with foresight and willpower, one can generate considerable revenue with relatively little effort.

The studies revealed that internet use in the traditional strong holds of the USA, Germany, the UK and Sweden has reached a plateau. On the other hand, in  countries  where English is not the native language such as  France,  Hong Kong,  Italy  and   Japan,  internet use is increasing exponentially.

As Kaizad Gotla, senior analyst at Nielsen Netratings states, “The  easiest opportunities  are in countries where internet usage patterns and user/site relationships are less  established. Acquiring users in markets that are currently in their growth stages  will  lead to a loyal user base that will pay dividends for internet companies in the future.”

2 ‐ Be the leader of the pack
Think outside the box if you want to get ahead in today’s competitive environment. Differentiate  your business from your competitors’. If they do not have multilingual websites, step up and take the lead. Establish your company or brand abroad before they do so. Eventually, companies without multilingual websites will have to contend with competitors who do. It is hardly surprising that customers would choose the website of the competitor that literally “speaks their language”.

3 ‐ Your website is your window to the world
The cost of localizing your website into another language is nominal compared with the returns you could gain. A multilingual website will bring an influx of new customers. By having your site accessible to potentially hundreds of thousands of people, you are showcasing your company across the world. For non‐English speaking users looking for your product or service, you automatically capture their attention.

4 ‐ Give your brand international presence
Having the ability to communicate to a whole new international audience in their own language will deliver results not only in the financial sense but also in terms of marketing and creating awareness of your brand, your range of services and products. A multilingual website is certainly one of the most cost effective ways of marketing your company, capturing new users, building relationships with new clients and giving your brand an international presence. Image is everything. A multilingual website demonstrates you think, work and deal across cultures and across borders.

5 ‐ Put in the personal touch
A multilingual website, if designed properly, overcomes potential cultural barriers through
allowing access in the local language. This immediately puts the user into a ‘cultural comfort zone’ as they are able to navigate, understand and interact with the website. This gives you bonus points as consumers who feel at home will be more willing to  engage your services or purchase your product.

6 ‐ Gain the trust of consumers
For many cultures there is an issue of trust when it comes to buying over the Internet, especially if the website is in a language they have trouble understanding fully. Offering your products or services in their local language allows customers to feel secure in the fact that they know what they are buying, the procedures they have to undertake and the people they are buying from.

7 ‐ Appeal to the popular search engines
Search engines lead people to your site. In China, Japan and France, Google, Yahoo and MSN are not the default search engines. Home-grown search engines are emerging and they are proving successful because they operate in their native languages and are focused on the habits and needs of their users. Such search engines are a key to tapping those markets and having pages of your site available in those languages ensure maximum potential for your site being picked up in searches.

8 – Test the waters with your website
Still unconvinced about the advantages of having a multilingual website? Well, a multilingual website is actually the perfect platform to test the response of a foreign market before you pump in more resources. With a multilingual website, you can communicate with a large audience and yet avoid the need to deal with the printing and distribution costs of having printed collaterals. Frequent updates to your website can be done with the click of a mouse, without incurring reprinting costs.

With the far-reaching advantages having a multilingual website brings, what else is holding you back?