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>> Home Business >> Opportunities Are Shouting - Are You Listening?
One of my cousin sister is a student of archaeology. She's got
a passion for it. A couple of days back she invaded our house
and dragged me to one of her friend's beautiful house backyard
where I had some weird but useful discussion with her friend.
Her friend turned out to be a direct marketer. As you may
expect, we started discussing everything related to marketing
and the Web. After about more than an hour of friendly
discussion, we had an argument over global marketing strategies.
Monty (my cousin's friend) had a view that when you make a
direct response website selling your products (such as ezine
publishing, or search engine resources) you don't necessarily
need to take in consideration the geographical aspect of market.
He believes these sort of products are for everyone working on
the Web regardless of local or global market.
I, on the other hand, and a firm believer of small niches
insisted that no matter what the product is, it has a small
niche market IF you're a small guy. If that is not true than why
experts have formulated global marketing strategies that deals
with micro markets? What's the point of collecting demographic
data? Etc...etc.
I further reiterated, and to make a valid statement using a
real world example talked about the Search Engines move towards
multi-lingual support. I said today everybody talks about
keywords, key phrases, power and generic words, keyword
densities and carefully crafted sentences. Almost all of the
major SE placement resources found on the Web are in English.
Emphasis is given on the way you make a systematic arrangement
of specific words within your web page to achieve a higher
ranking.
On the other hand, major Japanese search engines, such as
CyberSpace Japan at: http://www.csj.co.jp/ Japanese Yellow
Pages, such as Dragon's Joy at: http://joyjoy.com/JOY.html and
Biglobe at: http://search.biglobe.ne.jp/ are all relying heavily
on Japanese related keywords and key-phrases.
Now do you think if someone has to make a website in Japanese
language with Japanese related keywords, key phrases etc., can
make an "effective" use of the English SE placement resource? By
all means, not at all. Why? Because every language has it's own
grammar, or set of rules, style and vocabulary.
A Japanese website designer or webmaster would definitely find
it difficult to make effective use of the English language SE
placement resource. He would definitely be looking for some good
Japanese SE placement resource that can provide the needed
knowledge or services to him in his own mother language.
Now, don't you think if somebody could come up with a Japanese
SE placement resource in this case would make a killing? You
betcha.
How about adding some unique features or benefits to it? Man!
You're getting into the right game.
Although, English is currently the most widely used language on
the Net, a great need exists for non-English product(s) or
resource(s) like I mentioned above as in Search Engine's case.
And countless other areas too. Because most of the Web resources
comes in the English language.
So, if your mother language is Japanese but you can understand
good English, you can always convert your newly acquired
knowledge into useful Japanese version of the product. Doing
this, you'll have lesser competition, and you will target the
right market. Making money then becomes piece of cake :-)
I would bet that the guys who started up Yahoo! never imagined
that they would have a complete Japanese version that works much
like the English version does. Check out the Japanese Yahoo at:
http://www.yahoo.co.jp/
Even in the case of major large corporations, companies are
finding ways to get more flexible, customer-centric and
transparent to sustain and augment their presence in the
international markets. Already, plenty of major American
companies with huge marketing budgets have blown it overseas,
simply because they didn't do their homework in their proposed
markets.
Going global requires many considerations. These includes
customs, values, culture, money, language, economic health,
lifestyle etc...etc. Here I have only tried to highlight the
language aspect. More social and legal issues exist than I could
possibly cover here, and they all vary from country to country
and from region to region. The one place I suggest that you
check is a directory called International Business Resources
located at: http://globaledge.msu.edu/ibrd/ibrd.asp/
From the corporate perspective as well, I cited Monty some other
funny but true examples...
Braniff Airlines came up with a catchy slogan to promote it's
new upholstery: "Fly in Leather," The Spanish translation was,
unfortunately, "Fly naked.". Sex may sell, but it didn't help
Braniff.
Neither Pepsi nor Coke had much luck the first time they tested
the Chinese market. The Pepsi slogan "Pepsi brings you back to
life" translates to "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the
grave." Yikes!
Coke used a different tactic. It tried to come up with Chinese
letters that would be pronounced "Coca-Cola." What it actually
spelled in Chinese was "Bite the wax tadpole." (Sounds like
something a surfer might say.)
So the point I'm trying to make is... it's getting increasingly
important to customize your product(s) for specific markets and
learn as much as possible before hitting those markets, because
competition is building up rapidly. In my humble opinion, that’s
the ONLY way to get success at a rapid pace and the right way.
People with generic products will keep on spending their time
and dollars in a close loop endlessly. If they really want to
make their products sell, they must must identify the right
market and customize their wares according to the preferences of
the market they choose to serve.
Over the period, I have learned that personalization and
customization are the two important areas every entrepreneur
should explore seriously, if they are to make their business
successful online.
Okay, but what happened to our discussion?
Monty and I constantly talked about more than 2 hours. His
vision was realistic, but some of his ideas didn't make any
sense to me. So I thought I should share this experience with
you. Would you like to know what were the ending remarks of
Monty when I finally rolled up the discussion?...
"Amin, you're a hard nut to crack. I'm convinced. It's for the
first time somebody really bogged me down."
So the moral of the story is no matter what product or service
you offer, you must understand the implications of offering it
to the market you want it to sell to. The more you understand
the market, the more you can sell to it. Every other thing then
becomes secondary.
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