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Cultural Customization

posted 2006-09-27 13:14:13
by Andrew Thomas

Back in spring, I was on a panel discussing globalization management systems at The Localization Institute's conference on Managing Global Websites and eCommerce. I managed to catch a lecture by Nitish Singh, an Associate Professor of Marketing at California State University, Chico, where he talked at length about culturally customized websites. He even wrote a book on it (along with Arun Pereira) titled, fittingly enough, The Culturally Customized Web Site. It's a quick read at 155 pages, but don't let that fool you. There is some wonderful content here.

The basic premise is simple: the more culturally customized the website, the more time (and money) people will spend on it. Nitish and Arun prove this mathematically with extensive polling. First, they determine how localized a website is, sorting it into one of five categories ranging from no localization to highly culturally customized. Next, they track how effective these sites are in either conveying a message, or selling a product. To do this, much of the book is spent defining culture and cultural differences (i.e. idioms, slang, symbols, colors).

It's broken down very eloquently into the following cultural values framework: Individualism-Collectivism, Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Masculinity-Femininity, and High-Low Context. Essentially every locale (in the book they only discuss countries, but certainly this is applicable to smaller regions), has a unique makeup of these five values. For example, the United States is extremely focused on the individual, while China is very focused on the collective. Using common sense, does a me-centric marketing message developed for US products work in China, even after translation? Definitely not.

In the end, they consistently prove that higher cultural awareness and customization results in higher traffic and even a larger amount of purchases for e-commerce sites. Unfortunately, the localization industry still has a long way to go to meet the complete demands of this ideal. I also think this idea of cultural customization applies to all globalized content, in varying degrees, not just websites.

That said, at Idiom we've suggested our own best practices for building and maintaining global websites, called OGWA, to help companies ease into a better globalization structure for their website. It's an entirely new approach built on flexibility and balance of centralized control vs. local control. Essentially, it's one approach to dealing with the sticky issue of adaptation. Even with OGWA in place there are lots of other considerations to the complex problem of adaptation. This book highlights the importance of adaptation, and the need for a complete solution. We're certainly giving it considerable thought over here. So stay tuned…

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