Communicate your brand abroad

In the previous article, we addressed the internationalization of business abroad, offering ideas and strategies for dealing with and selling products and services in foreign markets.

Internationalization, together with multilingual SEO and brand communication in a foreign key, are the aspects of language consulting that Translations Universe is able to offer to localize its business abroad.

An important tool for exporting services and penetrating foreign markets can be the "Network Contract". This type of contract, regardless of the type of company, whether it is a limited company or a sole proprietorship, allows collaboration within the framework of a common program. The purpose of this contract is to develop, carry out joint research in order to exchange information (about the market or foreign customers) or to offer training to deal with a foreign campaign.

The basis of the production of a network contract is based on the strategic planning of business techniques, export management, and preparation for export. You need to be prepared to achieve the goal of selling on foreign markets or creating fruitful partnerships with distributors located in those markets.

Export readiness is a fundamental aspect, because, as discussed in the section on internationalization, it is necessary to know the cultural aspects related to a country that has been chosen as the target of its campaign.

For this purpose, a strategy to achieve the objective of foreign communication of your brand is certainly to seek an interlocutor who supports marketing at the local level, in the form of joint ventures. Being able to count on a local branch is an aspect that can strengthen or control the sales process.

The Joint Venture can be structured in different ways, in ascending order according to the incidence that the foreign partner has within the established company: the branch, the subsidiary, and the affiliate.

Whatever form of Joint Venture you choose, you need a marketing action that aims to communicate the perceived value of the business. Remember that, the action that aims to increase the perceived value of a brand, tag and focuses on the end-user (h2h => human to human) because it is the human being who reads, becomes attached to the brand and will probably repeat purchase once you choose our brand.

Under these circumstances, the distribution action can take on a direct character (if we are moving in the foreign market) or an indirect one (if we rely on a distributor - e.g. ex-works export mode).

In both cases, it is necessary to communicate to the market, strictly in the language of the end-user, the elements that led us to collaborate with local partners.

Brand value

By offering access to the product/service in the local language, it will be easier to give purchasing value to your brand (logistical and organizational value). It will be necessary to communicate what your product/service does and how it does it (technical and functional value), what the company offer represents for the customer (psychological and emotional value). The right combination of the above-listed values will communicate to the foreign customer guarantee and reliability, in order to generate wealth for the company that interfaces with the market in which the customer operates.

The value of a product/service is subjective for each customer and is enriched by the experience that the customer makes at the time of purchase. In this regard, we would like to remind you that pre-sales assistance, customer care, the added value of rapid delivery, reliable service and a return/replacement policy are all factors that contribute to improving the purchasing experience.

It is important to communicate to the customer why he is buying a value by choosing our company and therefore induce him to buy emotions related to our brand. To this end, it is useful to create some predictions, provide explicit or implicit promises related to the buying experience of other users (reviews can be a useful tool to communicate this aspect). We will have to give a specific meaning to our product/service and its characteristics and convince the customer to prefer our brand over the competition.

The criteria for measuring a brand vary according to specific aspects:

Attribution: Did customers perceive the brand as the source of benefits?
Conviction: Do customers know that the benefits are achievable? How quickly? What is the degree of satisfaction?
Desire: Does the purchase originate from the expectation of the benefit?
Difference: Is the brand perceived as the only source of benefit?

We underline the importance of communicating the values of a brand on a single channel scale (omnichannel), omnichannel means the integration between all the digital and traditional commercial channels of a company, designed to intercept the greatest number of customers both offline and online.

Digital channels, however, maintain primacy in governing the entire customer experience, regardless of where the product or service is then purchased. In practice, with omnicanality:

Traditional shops and companies sell their products on marketplaces, personal websites and social networks with integrated systems also at physical points of sale;
The big names in e-commerce have also understood the importance of offering an all-encompassing experience and are developing physical stores integrated with digital channels;
On-site events are useful to raise customer awareness of the benefits of choosing our brand;
The use of social channels is now integrated tools, in terms of sales and communication, that allow you to distribute and tell the brands.

The use of multiple sales channels and communication must tell the product/service to the reference market, leveraging the culture of the target country (e.g. if we produce beer, we will produce more carbonated beer for an Italian customer and less carbonated beer for a German customer). The type of communication to be adopted is therefore linked to the cultural aspects of the destination country and is directly governed by the linguistic habits of that country.

Concept development for sales abroad and brand generation

There are several strategies we can adopt to promote our brand abroad. We can adopt a differentiation strategy that leverages the characteristics that our brand, with its services/products, communicates compared to competing brands. Or, we can count on a disruptive strategy that communicates the characteristics of our brand in an explosive way in order to enhance the image that we want to convey abroad.

The levers of the marketing mix (product, price, place, promotion) help to communicate to the market the elements that have led us to a particular market, directly or indirectly, and therefore essential to the communication strategy that we intend to adopt.

We would also like to remind you of the fundamental importance of registering your trademark in the reference markets, in order to be able to defend the ownership of the brand and guarantee the exclusivity of distribution.