How to 'localise' your brand when launching or expanding in Asia

With around 65% of the world's international companies being present in Singapore, it is a great place to be a branding and communications specialist. While often headquartered overseas, many companies house their regional HQs in Singapore and have a certain degree of autonomy from global, while also having some influence over the wider APAC region.

Many multinationals set up in Singapore for all of the compelling reasons we are all well versed in: ease of doing business, favourable tax system, strong labour market, easy access to ASEAN markets, use of English etc., etc. However, many fall at the first hurdle by failing to localise or adapt their brand and messaging before hitting the market.

Getting to know your audience
The single biggest mistake made by a lot of organisations of all sectors, shapes, and sizes, in my view, is failing to truly understand their local customers or audience. In the consumer world, research is a given, though it's not always done well or translated into meaningful and useful insight, but at least it is pretty much always attempted.

However, a recent survey found that only 4 in 10 b2b marketing executives are confident in their understanding of their customers' wants, needs, likes, and interests. This is pretty astounding, especially given how complex b2b buying processes can be.

How can anyone possibly get their brand, products, service, offering, messaging, and communication right if they don't know what their audience wants?

Simplicity is key
Marketing is becoming a more and more complicated discipline in some ways, with clever terms for all sorts of aspects that are nowhere near as baffling as they are made out to be, but what many businesses fail to see is how simple it can really be.

One of the cornerstones of successful marketing, that has characterised it for decades, is providing compelling messages and images to an audience in the right time and place to convince them to choose you. Simple.

But you could quickly get into a right old mess if you guess at what your customers want, or where they go or even who they are! That's when marketing turns into a useless expense, with its value impossible to prove.

With increased emphasis on return on investment (ROI), one sure fire way of maximising marketing spend is investing in understanding your market so that your marketing activity resonates and reaps rewards.

Proving the value of this to the powers that be can be challenging, but if you are able to provide concrete evidence of what your customers want and how you can reach them, it will be far easier to convince them to sign off budgets or increase investment in marketing.

This will also help you to put a case together for adjusting or changing global branding or messaging to better suit local market needs.

Big data = big marketing advantage
The digital age has brought with it so much information, access to data, profiles, analytics, etc.; sometimes it can be hard to see the wood for the trees. But the reality is that you can now build up a better picture of your audience than ever before, without breaking the bank.

Simple online surveys done well and seeded in the right places can get you all kinds of useful information in days. Testing advertising creative and campaigns is also much easier to do than ever before.

Automated marketing software can help you to build up incredibly detailed pictures of who your customers are and what they are interested in, allowing you to provide them with tailored content that will really hit home.

A balancing act
Once companies are confident that they know and understand their audience in a new market, achieving the right balance between maintaining the look, feel, personality, and messaging of a global company or product brand and ensuring it will resonate locally is really the key.

As much insight as possible into local audiences will ensure branding strategies are developed and adjusted based on facts rather than assumptions and they are therefore much more likely to succeed.

There are lots of well quoted examples of when companies have got it wrong when trying to launch in Asia – 'Come Alive with Pepsi' being translated as 'Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead' as an extreme example.

These kinds of calamities can always be avoided with simple checks but often much more subtle things can impact the success of a brand in Asia. For example, using imagery that doesn't reflect cultural norms, choosing colours that are inauspicious, and attempting humour or playfulness that may resonate in the US or Europe but falls flat here.

Every aspect of a brand's being needs to be analysed, assessed, tested, and adapted if required, from logos, images, colours, product format, packaging, messaging, straplines to the brand essence. This takes three important things:
1. Time and planning
2. Audience insight
3. Great local staff or consultants who know the culture, customs, and norms of a country.

And there you have it. Localising your brand so that it succeeds in Asia…it's as easy as 1, 2, 3.