The traditional way to capture the customer perspective is with interviews, surveys and focus groups – but for online marketers reaching beyond the U.S. market to grow multi-nationally, that can be a difficult, time-consuming process in local markets. A new 4.0 release of Keynote’s WebEffective adds new functionality to the online customer survey and analysis software and expands that capacity into eight languages.
“The hardest part about going overseas to new markets is the aspect of getting the voice of the customer and understanding attitudes and cultural innuendos,” says Carol Carpenter, senior director of product management at Keynote. “You can’t just translate the U.S. perspective because the markets are different.”
For example, notes Carpenter, the use of mobile devices is more entrenched in some markets outside the U.S. than it is here; with the results that the ability to search and transact business from a mobile device is more important in those markets than it is here currently. Carpenter notes that recent discussion between Keynote and prospective customers in Asia revealed that consumers there tend to look to Korea, not the U.S., as the pacesetter for how consumers will use technology. “We think of ourselves in the U.S. as the center of the world in what we are doing with Mobile and the Internet, but that’s skewed,” says Carpenter. “With three of four different standards for mobile communications, we don't have the infrastructure. In other markets, the younger generation is ahead of us in how they view the Internet.”
Gathering data on attitudes, desires, what motivates loyalty and other marketing attributes directly from consumers in local markets in their own language captures information and nuances important to understanding the market that might otherwise get lost in translation. For example, a recent WebEffective study on search conducted in China revealed information about the Chinese consumer’s Internet behavior that shed light on one reason Google search has a bigger market share than Yahoo search in China: Chinese Internet users prefer to start a web search at a dedicated search engine rather than a portal of which search is one part.
Carpenter ads that WebEffective 4.0 can accelerate ex-U.S. market development because the self-scripting testing tool can obtain information more in quickly local markets by reaching consumers online and by understanding the data with the application of powerful analytics built into the software.
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