Managing a Successful, International Retail Brand: Tips and Tricks

Creating a successful international retail brand is a complex business. There are way more moving parts than in a brand located in just one country, with different cultures, languages, and even different social media platforms all at play. There are some key elements to consider when building a strategy for brand creation.

Determining Demographics

To narrow focus, first figure out what the target audience demographics are. Look at the company’s existing website and social media analytics pages. These show, among other things:

The ages and genders of people visiting the company pages.
The most popular times people visit.
How long they spend on the website and which pages or posts are the most popular.
How many people find the social media posts through hashtags.
How many people take an action, such as clicking through to a product purchase page.

This gives a good overall picture of the demographics the company should focus on. Now focus the research on the values and preferences of that demographic, in each country. To do this, the company will need to undertake serious cultural research.

Understanding Cultures

When a company sells a product that is sold in multiple countries, it must provide compelling reasons as to why the consumer should choose that product over all the other ones already available or even produced in the customer’s home country.

Adapting unique business brand strategies for each country and culture is essential. To implement the best brand marketing practices in each country, companies need to fully understand the culture there to avoid missteps, like the time Coors unfortunately translated “turn it loose” into “get diarrhea” in Chinese.

Understand what sort of messages each culture prefers, to reflect this in the brand. Each culture the company will have a presence in should be fully researched to discover this. Cultures have different symbols and rituals that are important to them, and these should be understood in order to avoid any misunderstandings.

Also important is what type of messaging each culture prefers. For example, the French tend to respond best to “dream-oriented fantasy” pitches while Germans prefer persuasion through information. The Japanese like advertisements that emphasize respect for their elders and the importance of family.

Using Social Media

Social media is important to any brand, especially international ones. To build positive brand recognition, consider mounting a social media campaign for a cause, like bringing attention to global warming or whatever fits in with the company’s image.

Here are some other tips for creating a successful international social media campaign:

Know which social media platforms are popular in the target country. For example, the most popular social network for young people in Japan isn’t Facebook; it’s one called Mixi.
Understand how people are using those social media platforms. In India, it’s all about sharing music and online gaming, so a social media campaign would have to incorporate one of those elements.
Have a good understanding of each region within that country. Just like the U.S., where the southern states are very different from the western ones, each country has regional differences and should have a different brand strategy.
Consider hiring a social media manager or using media influencers (below) to interact with the customers.
Look at successful social media campaigns for inspiration. For example, Nike’s 30^th anniversary “Just Do It” campaign with Colin Kaepernick was a timely and successful marketing coup for the sports giant. GE uses fascinating scientific research and video to support its brand, like this post about descending into a volcano.

Always use a unique hashtag for the campaign. This makes is easy to find and allows people to post complimentary photos with the hashtag, too.

Using Influencer Marketing

In influencer marketing, companies ask people with a lot of followers on a social media platform, such as YouTube, to market their products on their channels or accounts. In return, the company pays the influencer in money, ad revenue, or product. The difference between this and an endorsement is that the influencer makes their own “ad” by simply incorporating the product into their media stream.

This allows for very successful niche marketing. For example, a company marketing specialized cooking pot equipment would ask influencers with cooking YouTube channels or Instagram food accounts to partner up, perhaps giving the influencer the products to try. In return, thousands of eyeballs see the product being used by an already trusted source.

It’s important for companies to remember to research the media influencers to make sure their online presence will be helpful to the company, and that there’s nothing detrimental in their past content that would go against the company’s brand image. For example, PewDiePie, YouTube’s biggest star with 35 million followers, had many influencer deals, including one with Razer headset. But his tendency to make anti-Semitic jokes throughout his career has made him unfavorable to many and caused great controversy. If brands had researched his past posts thoroughly, this association could have been avoided.

This may be one reason that micro-influencers are now more favored than those with millions of followers Micro-influencers have smaller audiences—five figures instead of six—but their audiences participate much more more in that niche area. This may garner a better ROI (return on investment).

Being Adaptive and Proactive

The successful international brand manager doesn’t just react to the market. They are adaptive and proactive. When IKEA introduced its furniture into China, it had a difficult time because it was too expensive for most younger people and the older people had more trusted brands and could afford different furniture. This was something that brand image or marketing alone could not solve. Instead of giving up, IKEA built factories there to cut costs, and also redesigned some of its furniture to better fit into the smaller homes of the Chinese.

In another example, when China had a food safety crisis, the American company Philips immediately created a new soy milk with higher food safety standards, which was then very successful and launched an extremely positive brand image for the company.

Creating a Unified Company

Perhaps the final step in the creation of a successful international brand is making sure the company culture is consistent in all the offices, no matter which country it’s located in. Some tools for implementing this:

Communicate a shared identity and goal. This makes like everyone feel like they’re on the same team.
Provide great communication. A company blog or newsletter keeps everyone up to date and feeling like they’re participating.
Use social media designed for companies. Check out software like Yammer, which is like Facebook for businesses. It lets employees can share pictures and information, and message with each other no matter where they are.
Standardize policies. Each office should share the same rules and policies. If one office has different policies that are perhaps more favorable than another’s, workers will be left feeling bitter instead of unified.

Managing a successful international brand is indeed complicated, but like any complicated project, it can be managed if broken down into small parts and understood.

There are dozens of international companies that combat these challenges every day. Saint James, Subway, and Nike — just to name a few. Creating a complete plan will take planning, work, and possibly hiring some additional employees to help, but it will be well worth it.