“Nothing sucks like an Electrolux!” Bit harsh you might think, whatever your preferred brand of vacuum cleaner, but this wasn’t a comment from an irate punter on a social forum, it was actually the strap-line chosen by the Scandinavian appliance maker to launch its cleaner into the US market. Ouch!
Electrolux aren’t the only well-known brand to be left with ouef on their boat-races through lack of appreciation of the nuances of language or culture. Pepsi famously used a literal translation of their “Come alive with Pepsi” slogan in China and ended up telling bemused Chinese consumers that “Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Grave”. And perhaps surprisingly, American airline, Braniff Airways’s exhortation to Spanish-speaking travelers to ‘Fly Naked’, rather than the intended ‘Fly in Leather’ (which still sounds pretty suspect to me) didn’t have the hoped for impact on sales.
If the huge multinational FMCG companies, with their multi-million pound marketing budgets, can make mistakes like these then you can be sure it can happen to anyone. Language is a key part of how we communicate, and nuances in language can have a massive impact on how effective our communications are.
Messages don’t just get lost in translation when marketing internationally. The same problem can occur even when all communications are in the same language. During the implementation of any B2B go-to-market programme, there will be multiple audiences that need to be addressed, including internal stakeholders such as salepeople, pre-sales specialists and post-sales support people, as well as the numerous external audiences – business decision-makers, technical influencers, end-users, resellers, analysts, journalists etc etc.
Each of these audiences has its own culture and there will be subtle differences in the language that they will understand and respond to. Unless we understand these differences there is a high chance that our messages will fall flat, and in extreme cases do damage to our brand.
The challenge of getting the language right is particularly acute within the ICT sector, which is awash with technical jargon. Even if we take the technology out of the equation, terms like ‘value proposition’ and ‘market segmentation’ might be commonly understood by one group (e.g. the marketing department), but opaque to another (e.g. the salespeople). Some words, ‘application’ for example, might mean very different things to different people.
To ensure the effectiveness of our go-to-market progammes, it’s essential that we understand each of the key audiences that we need to influence, and that we communicate to them in the language that will be meaningful to them. We need to imagine ourselves into the minds of those audiences, understand their culture and environment, and then think about how we can communicate our message in the most relevant and compelling way.
Getting this right requires discipline and rigour – it’s easy to fall into lazy generalizations. For example, unless you operate in a very narrow market your customers are not an homogenous group. The language and messages that would be relevant to the CIO of a multinational software company are entirely different to those that will appeal to the Director of a small business, who takes care of the IT in between making sales, managing the finances and arranging for the rubbish to be collected.
Of course, the fact that we need to segment our messages for different audiences doesn’t mean that we should end up saying completely different things to different people. We still need a consistent underlying message that underpins all of our communication, to ensure that we don’t end up confusing our market. Some of the tools we use at OneGTM, such as Message Mapping and Messaging Frameworks, can be useful in ensuring you communicate in a relevant way to each of your target audiences, but within a consistent framework.
Ultimately though, no tool can compensate for lack of understanding about the markets you operate in and the culture of the audiences that you want to reach. After all you don’t want your target audience to have the same reaction that British buyers did in the late-70s when Wang Computer adopted the slogan “Wang Cares”!
