[Unfortunately for those of us with a sense of humour the video has been removed so you can no longer watch. Sadly I have not been able to find a version from another source.  However I am sure that the campaign will live on in legend.]

I think we all appreciate the sentiment expressed by the lady doing the voice-over and you have to admire her direct approach. But I doubt very much she knew what she was saying – always a danger when you slip a few words of a foreign lingo into your spiel, chica!

In case the message was not reaching enough of an audience they were also (and still are?) giving a out a badge with the unabridged version of  ”F*** the Diet” still on it.  Happily now the Facebook site has been updated and the badge censored, much to the disappointment of German lads everywhere!

However, the website where you can download the badge is still there in all its glory as this goes to press!

Transcreation at its best or worst? You decide.

Read the article in full on Brand Republic.

And in case they fix it soon, here is a screenshot for posterity!

You betcha! Once again, China proves that it is not a homogeneous part of the global marketplace.

Which car brand has the most cachet in China?

Well, according to a recent article in the New York Times, unless you are a retired pensioner, it is best to avoid a Mercedes-Benz in China if you want to make a statement of subtle and assured power. To add insult to injury for German car makers, despite improving sales, the BMW has acquired a reputation as the car for the arrogant and rash, rather than as a status symbol of the successful, upwardly mobile business executive of the West.

On the other hand, General Motor’s Buick brand – largely unknown outside of North America and once acknowledged by GM as ‘damaged’ in the US – has amazingly positioned itself in China as a top-tier luxury car.

However, in a country under the firm control of the political elite underpinned by a Byzantine bureaucracy, any brand bestowed with the patronage of all-powerful government officials is likely to be the one with the highest cachet.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, if you are an up-and-coming bureaucrat in China, the only car for you is the Audi A6 – Jeremy Clarkson, eat your hat!

Finally, a recent post on Sina Weibo, China’s most popular social media site, appositely sums up the current state of car demographics:

“A gathering of Mercedes indicates a get-together for old folks”, the writer said. “A group of BMWs means young nouveau riche are about to run someone over and have a party; several Audis, and you know it’s a government meeting.”

So don’t forget when promoting your product in a new locale, make sure your brief clearly and explicitly identifies your target demographic. And don’t make assumptions about their behaviour based on domestic perceptions.

Remember, any narrative-type content will require adaptation: “Clint, driving his ’98 Caddy down Highway 101, clutching a Starbuck’s latte in one hand with ZZ-Top blasting out of his iPod” will need a light touch to ensure that the message gets across in Shanghai, Novosibirsk or Doha.

Firstly, the word ‘transcreation’ – it’s not new

At Wordbank we have been providing this service since the mid ’90s – our Conquest™ service was launched in 1997 specifically to offer a better way of adapting creative copy to different local markets. Indeed, I first heard the term back in 1996. It was coined by a European advertising agency executive laboriously making a point about how marketing should be properly adapted rather than just translated.

Admittedly, at the time I, like many, considered it an ugly mongrel of a word and the advertising executive in question worthy of immediate membership of “pseuds corner”.

However, I believe that the real issue here is neither one of semantics nor of different flavours of translation. What it is really about is how much value a particular company puts on customer service and the customer experience in practice.

How many times have you heard a major international company say how much they value their customers and that excelling at customer service is part of their corporate DNA?

Clear, effective communication

Actions speak louder than words

Clear, effective communication is an essential part of customer service.

Take the hotel business, for example. Customer service is essential: our first and last contact with any hotel will most probably be with the reception/front desk staff. Before we even get near the product we have been sold (i.e. a bed for the night), we must run the service gauntlet of online booking and negotiate our way through the potentially treacherous waters of check-in.

Consumer experience... (Cross at the crossing, Brazil)

I often wonder if hotel staff experience the same fear and trepidation that I feel as I approach the front desk of a strange hotel anywhere. Does that sharp smile and equally sharp uniform disguise an accident waiting to happen or a warm, welcoming, kind human being keen to pander to all my jet-lagged, stressed-out executive needs?

Whatever happens, the outcome is categorized, filed and ranked in my personal database of experienced brand value logged against the probability of a future return visit. In other words, duly noted.

During the summer I have had several hotel experiences, variously in Sicily, Milan and Denver. Somewhat surprisingly considering America’s celebrated customer service culture, my overall experiences were better in Sicily and Milan than Denver, although I have lost count of the times I have stayed in the Denver hotel in question. To put it bluntly, their CRM system should have been blaring ‘regular customer, retain at all costs’ when I checked-in. So something failed.

Yes, I was ready to quit, never to return

Yes, my Denver minibar fridge failed miserably in its mission to refrigerate and despite informing reception no less than three times, nothing was done about it. I just gave up, did not use the minibar and logged three large black marks in the aforementioned mental database.

The Sicilian and Italian staff, however, were just plain helpful and considerate, despite minimal English in the Sicilian case. I left feeling well-disposed to the staff and the company in both instances.

All very well, but how does this relate to transcreation?

The whole thing comes down to brand EXPECTATION versus brand EXPERIENCE.  And in today’s world, that often means online brand experience as much as face-to-face or voice contact.

We do not need a management consultant to point out that the arbiter of satisfaction is as much the overall level of service we receive as the quality of the product itself. For instance, Hugo Boss is a designer of world renown, a premium brand and one I rated. However, two recent and disastrous experiences with their online store mean that I will think twice about going down that route again and indeed my perception of the whole brand has been sorely dented.

Does the level of service match the message?

On the other hand, love or hate Ryanair, you are never left in any doubt about the (basic) level of service to expect and the actual brand experience tends to live up to that (or down to it, depending on your perspective). The staff may irritate you with their constant sales banter but equally they are helpful, friendly and have a sense of humour. Ryanair’s messaging is clear and effective – you definitely get what you pay for.

The message vs. the level of service

A lot is talked about machine translation, translation technologies, shared translation memories etc., all good stuff for driving down the cost of translation to the lowest level. But what message does that send to your customers? Is the quality of content on your website, in an email, on the landing page, in the sales or channel training modules good, or just good enough to make sense?

How happy are we really when we tick the satisfactory or average box for level of service? We are certainly not delighted, or going to recommend to a friend or enthuse on Twitter. As for the post-order customer service I received after calling Hugo Boss, I have had more success talking to my kitchen wall. And now I’m telling you about it.

Posted on the UK Guardian website 25 July 2011

Any company promoting a value proposition which includes or implies a commitment to a high level of service and/or product quality is surely creating a market expectation that company communications will reflect that commitment locally rather than being just good enough.

With translation technology virtually open to all (thanks to Google), is there not an opportunity for the smarter company to differentiate by making their website and online communications in general more stimulating, interesting and sensitive to the local audience/target demographic?

Search engines aside, surely the customer or prospect is the prime target for websites and online marketing?

Nike, BMW, Hugo Boss. All of them make clear brand promises, as does Michael O’Leary at Ryanair, now the biggest airline in the UK (in the 12 months ending June 2011, Ryanair carried 75.5 million passengers). He makes it clear that Ryanair wants to be the biggest and the cheapest, and the quality of customer service correlates with the price you pay.

How do you want the local market to perceive your brand? Veering towards a Michael O’Leary or a Hugo Boss?

I am fortunate to have spent the past week or so on holiday near Syracuse, on the eastern coast of Sicily. The weather has been very changeable, but far from chilly. What is staggering is that along with the sun, sea, sand and tourists, you are surrounded, everywhere you turn, by ancient history. The evidence of past civilizations is ubiquitous. Crossing the bridge into Ortygia, the original Greek island settlement of Syracuse, you virtually fall straight into the Temple of Apollo. Well, what’s left of it. Turn around and cast your eyes upwards and you see the Greek Theatre, the foundations of the huge, sacrificial altar of Hieron II (241BC onwards) and, finally, the impressive Roman Amphitheatre.

Language is everywhere

Language is everywhere you look: dedications and graffiti in ancient Greek and Latin, religious Latin, modern Italian and Sicilian too. I finally had to admit that those five years of Latin at school weren’t a waste of time after all.
Yes, they do speak Italian here in Sicily. I know that sounds like stating the obvious but they also speak Sicilian or various dialects thereof. However, when it comes to ranking one of the most rich and historically diverse languages, modern Sicilian has to be way up there near the top of anyone’s list. Exploring Sicilian is a bit like entering a linguistic crime scene with clues, debris and contamination from more cultures than you can shake a stick at. This paragraph from Wikipedia nicely sums up why this is so:
“Because Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean and virtually all Mediterranean peoples have passed through it (Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, French, Aragonese, Spanish, Italians), Sicilian displays the rich and varied influence of several languages on its lexical stock and grammar. Such languages include Greek, Latin, Arabic, Norman, Lombard, Provençal, German, Catalan, French, Spanish and of course Italian, to say nothing of prehistoric influence from the island’s pre-Indo-European inhabitants. The very earliest influences, visible in Sicilian to this day, exhibit both prehistoric Mediterranean elements and prehistoric Indo-European elements, and occasionally a blending of both (Giarizzo 1989 and Ruffino 2001).”

Speak Sicilian

The following few examples of Sicilian, with their Italian and English equivalents, will give you a flavour of the Sicilian language:

fà[ci]ri na bedda fiùra = fare una bella figura (to make a good impression)
vinu = vino (wine)
òmu = uomo (man)
fìmmina = donna (woman)
dabbanna = l’altra parte (the other side)
docu = lì (there)
vussìa = Lei (you – polite form)
Accura! = Stai attento! (Be careful!)
iddu = lui (him/he)
idda = lei (her/she)
Cu paja prima, pistìa li pisci fitùsi = Chi paga prima, mangia il pesce puzzolente (He who pays before seeing the goods gets cheated – or literally: Who pays before eats smelly fish)

The Sicilian market or locale

Sicily is an excellent holiday island, with the contrast of craggy coasts, sun-drenched beaches and wooded mountains. Not to mention the portentous, vineyard-ringed and ski slope-adorned mass of Etna. But on your way to that excellent fish restaurant by the harbour, take time to notice the classically steepled catholic church that was once a mosque, added to an old Christian church built on a Greek temple. Not far below the surface you will find a rich and intriguing mélange of cultures.

In terms of marketing and transcreation, Sicily is very definitely a separate locale with its own identity, language and culture but the vast majority of conventional marketing communications I came across was in Italian, which is what you would expect from major, mass-appeal brands.

Sicilian Cassata Cake

There is, however, an opportunity for a company wishing specifically to target the Sicilian consumer market to use the local idiom in both messaging and search marketing. Conversely, as various Sicilian words have been adopted into the Italian language, any brand wishing to convey a ‘Sicilian’ image or heritage could readily do so by using the Sicilian idiom and imagery. An example of this would be marketing a Sicilian pasta sauce or the particularly Sicilian desert of Cassata, which bears no resemblance to the ice cream confection labelled as Cassata and offered in Italian restauarants outside of Italy.

Cassata is a Sicilian word as is caruso, which means ‘boy’ and has been adopted into Italian.

These are simple examples and the underlying message is simple, too: know your market and talk to your target audience in their own language or as close as you can afford. Even better, take a trip to Catania and see for yourself.

I received an email on Tuesday 5 May from a British company called Corpdata aiming to sell me B2B marketing lists with the headline: “Accurate data killed Osama bin Laden (helped by US Special  Forces)”.

A tenuous link at best and definitely a case of jumping on the nearest and most recent bandwagon. Cheese aside, does it work from a marketing perspective?

On the one hand, I laud the speed of response and yes, the targeting is correct.  But on the other hand, how can I take it seriously? The Roquefort quotient is only increased when you note the company’s name – Corpdata. Or should that be ‘Corpsedata‘? Ouch!

Yes, folks, roll up! With our B2B marketing lists you too can be just like the US Navy Seal Team Six!

That’s a claim I would like to see them substantiate. Also, how exactly would potential clients feel about a heavily armed team of assassins dropping in through the roof? Agreed, it will have a significant impact.

(One thing that is bothering me about this whole story is, given the location of the hit, right in the middle of central Asia, not far from the border with Afghanistan and Tajikistan and some 1,500 km from the sea, why were Navy Seals first in line for the mission? Not really seal or penguin territory, is it?)

Anyway, make up your own mind: here is the prime cheddar of the day in most of its glory. Feel free to contact Corpdata to ask for a testimonial from the Seals.

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Subject: Accurate data killed Osama bin Laden (helped by US Special  Forces)

The US ‘Most Wanted List’ has seen a bit of a shake-up.

Accurate information enabled the US to target their attention on a walled compound in Abbottabad. As a direct result, the small group of people called US Navy Seal Team Six have changed the shape of the international terrorist threat. It may yet prove to be an illusion, but many people will feel safer as a result. Yet despite their evident skill and years of experience, the troops would have been powerless to act without good information.

But Al-Qaeda is still in business, and you need to be too!

Accurate information is just as vital for your marketing. You need to target the

• right people with the
• right authority in the
• right organisations

Corpdata offers you the most accurate B2B marketing data in the UK, that’s a fact!

With average data age of just 94 days, and 13 decision makers at each site, you can target the correct decision maker for your campaign.

To ensure your marketing is as effective as US Navy Seal Team Six, call us now on 01626 777400.

Corpdata – Always up to date [viz: any bandwagon, always cheesy]

—————————————————————————————————————————

EXPECTATION versus brand EXPERIENCE.

Countries like Russia and China are renowned for their volumes of paperwork and the requirement for the ‘chop mark’ or rubberstamp on every second page. The Spanish phrase “mañana” has also become synonymous with the ‘why do today what you can put off until tomorrow‘ approach. Like all good stereotypes (if stereotypes can be good), these contain a hint of reality.

Not that I am suggesting that any marketing and advertising strategy is ever based on stereotypes – that is always an easy but dangerous road to go down. But this clip, which I have entitled “The revenge of the Spanish punter“, neatly acknowledges and parodies the stereotype simultaneously. And yes, it was produced in Spain as part of the Jameson Short Film Festival.

Certainly in the UK we regularly bleat about Public Sector and “Jobsworth”-type bureaucracy, which appears mainly to aid task avoidance on behalf of the official or company representative involved rather than serving any real purpose.

Trust me, based on my experiences of living in Russia and Spain, British bureaucracy is not even in the top 10. Although the UK Borders Agency is doing its best to catch up.

As ever, the comments are often as entertaining as the video. Paste this one into Google Translate:

“El poder de la burocracia en manos de los funcionarios, no jode todos los días. Si bien esto fue filmado en España, en cualquier país sudamericano esto se sufre !!!!”

Of course, you will get a literal translation but I’m sure you will also get the drift.

__________________________________________________________________________

NOTE: Always get your advertising and sub-titling localized by a company that understands cultural nuance and has the skill to produce the media involved.

Suffice to say that attitudes to women vary significantly across globe.

Today, however,  is a good opportunity for we men to consider for a moment the realities of life as  women.

So, whose eyes better to view this role than the renowned Mr Bond,  labelled as he is with a certain reputation in regard to women. Indeed, who better than Dame Judi Dench in the persona of  ‘M’ to be Mr Bond’s  inner voice of reason?

(Click on Mr Bond to watch the video)

To all women out there, Wordbank wish you:

Grattis på internationella kvinnodagen 100 år!

Feliz Dia da Mulher!

Čestitke za dan žena.

Παγκόσμια Ημέρα της Γυναίκας: Ημέρα γιορτής και περισυλλογής.

C 8-ым марта дорогие дамы!

Joyeuse journée de la femme!

Wszystkiego Najlepszego z okazji Dnia Kobiet

Happy International Women’s Day!

p.s. Follow our tweets at http://twitter.com/WordbankLtd

<Well, it’s nearly Christmas again. Or is it?

Yes, if you live in North America, Oz, Kiwi-land or the UK and bits of Western Europe it is, but outside of that it all goes to Greenland in a handcart. Strictly speaking, of course, Christmas does not exist for the majority of the world’s population, but that doesn’t stop bedecked fir trees from being lit up in Dubai or Hong Kong. The Russians still stick to the archaic calendar and celebrate Christmas after New Year’s Eve, and everyone else.  And so it goes.

It is a complete minefield for many a corporate marketer:

• How many corporate databases capture religion as a standard field in their CRM?
• >Or stop to consider that it may not be Christmas where the customer is?
• How does the average Westerner feel about getting an email blast for Eid or Diwali?

Conversely, how many Europeans are irritated by the insidious “Season’s Greetings” or, worse,  “Happy Holidays“? As far as I’m concerned my “holidays” are when I spend at least two weeks in sunny climes well removed from work, colleagues and blogging. Certainly not to be confused with that grim, dark, grey part of the year we Brits still call “Christmas”.

Anyway, here at Wordbank we thought it would be a bit of fun to create an interactive, multimedia Christmas Trivia Quiz to amuse any of you who might be interested in how Christmas is celebrated across the globe.

Finally, just to prove that being a luxury brand doesn’t mean that you don’t make mistakes like the rest of us, can you spot the error in this ‘Christmas email’ to an American colleague? Click to view and Spot the error.

P.S.  For the Scots (NB: Scotch is what you drink) it is New Year’s Eve or Hogmanay that is the big night including, of course, singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

Actually, once you hear it you may wonder what all the fuss is about as it is so clearly just a slip of the tongue. The notoriety is no doubt down to the fact that the ‘C’ word is probably the last taboo word in the media. But then again, what is ‘taboo’ depends on your cultural perspective.

The real irony here is that the individual concerned, one Jeremy Hunt, UK Culture Secretary, was just about to be interviewed about the UK Government’s new £830 million broadband policy. So he heard it all verbatim and had the presence of mind and sense of humour to tweet:

“They say prepare for anything before going on Today but that took the biscuit. I was laughing as much as u Jim.” “Or should I say Dr Spooner,” he added.

The BBC reported the incident on its own website in a very balanced manner and had the magnanimity to post a link to a recording of the broadcast within the article.

Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph took the opportunity to rake up some previous BBC malapropisms including the now famous ‘legover’ incident. I won’t spoil your enjoyment, but a ‘legover’ is very different from a leg-up and normally much more fun.  Read the article and get the comments first hand.

What is interesting about all of this is that the spoonerism does not appear to have caused much real offence. The majority of people listening to the current affairs programme at 8:00am were most probably preoccupied with the normal Monday morning chores of getting the kids to school and themselves out of the door to work. Many more probably assumed that they had imagined it. Or would have had not James Naughtie a) started sniggering and b) apologised profusely and repeatedly.

In most cultures it not so much what you say as the way you say it, and even ‘a job well-done’ can be turned into an insult with the right level of sarcastic sneer. The tone of voice used is more important than the actual words, but different communities will always have varying thresholds as to how much innuendo or exposure is acceptable in advertising and the media in general.

I leave you with an old schoolboy spoonerism/joke.

What’s the difference between a cross-country runner and Gordon Ramsay?

Answer:  One’s a pant in the country…

Never more so than in the corporate promotion world.  If you are not posted on YouTube you are not a happening brand. Video is where the action is and everyone is jumping on the bandwagon – well, so all those spam emails tell me anyway.

However,  going global with your video raises the hairy problem of whether to dub or subtitle.  Clearly it is always going to be cheaper to subtitle, but then is that going to appear really naff to your target audience just when you were trying to convince them your brand is über-cool?

Check out this article by Francesca Riggio and see how different cultures respond to dubbing and subtitling. Assume nothing when it comes to second guessing cultural preferences.

	Look inside >
Dubbing vs. subtitling – Francesca Riggio