Brands Global Journey with Erica Haims

Erica Haims is the founder of Haims Consulting where she specializes in Localization Marketing and the marketing of the localization industry.  She has served on the board of Women in Localization and has held long-term roles at Apple and Atlantic Records. The current pandemic has had a huge impact on many brands' localization and globalization, as it has fast-tracked the demands on the digital experience. Erica promotes breaking through silos by promoting collaboration, clear communication, and consistent terminology and infrastructure alignment. She has a unique vantage point when looking at the brand journey as it travels across the globe. This allows her to connect the dots between globalization and localization. Her blog, “Globalization Motivation,” is devoted to breaking the silos that exist between vendors, clients, and identifying where localization should be in the globalization conversation. KEY TAKEAWAYS Small to medium-sized companies should look at the bigger brands’ mistakes and what they are doing. Brand consistency and recognition are important but how the bigger companies behave is also important. Using localisation, being open-minded, having good communication, reacting very quickly, giving that trust and being flexible, also for the product. For global growth, small companies also should have flexible products or platforms or services to compete with the others. BEST MOMENTS  “Brand consistency and that’s intentional, it’s very detailed. Small companies may not pay that much attention to detail cause it requires, besides consistency, it requires strict content management, communication has to be very clear, there has to be alignment and that’s really where I think there is such an important on brand message, keeping that brand consistent as it travels.” “People want to be spoken to. They wanna be spoken to in their own language. But it’s that customer demand that really drives that personalisation. So, Glocalisation has really come out of where you have local words necessary.” “When I think of the big three, there are three things. The first thing is insulting your customer, you alienate your customer. Then that they are not gonna want to come back. They’ve been insulted. Then you have legal actions, so where you can be sued, then you have a huge financial loss there because you run into lawsuits where you’ve lied or you’ve broken a rule, you’ve used some image that is really proprietary to someone else…So, there is insulting then getting sued and then there’s local regulation that companies are not aware of when they go into a region.” “The big thing is to prepare that not think of globalisation as an afterthought. We will be going global. We need to build our product to, let’s say, handle multiple characters or realize that we’re going to have to have multiple versions of the product or the marketing. I think you have to do that at the onset and think about those worst-case scenarios. What’s really great is, I say, learn from the bigger companies’ mistakes because they can absorb the mistakes.” ABOUT THE HOST Levent Yildizgoren, the author of 'Good Business in any Language', is an award-winning entrepreneur, localisation professional, and a PRINCE2 qualified project manager. CONTACT METHOD Linkedin:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/leventyildizgoren/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/yildizgoren IG: https://www.instagram.com/levent.yildizgoren/ ABOUT THE GUEST Erica Haims is the founder of Haims Consulting where she specializes in Localization Marketing and the marketing of the localization industry. Her blog, “Globalization Motivation,” is devoted to breaking the silos that exist between vendors, clients, and identifying where localization should be in the globalization conversation. CONTACT METHOD https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericahaimsinternationalcontent https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/globalization-motivation-6461716006380412928/ www.haimsconsulting.com VALUABLE RESOURCES Do you have any questions about translation, localization, or international growth? Visit TTC website: https://ttcwetranslate.com/ Take your business global with the 5-step LINGO modal! Purchase 'Good Business in any Language' on Amazon now: https://cutt.ly/2ORR