While companies from any part of the world will struggle with branding across cultures, American companies are struggling more than their European counterparts, says a report from Forrester Research Inc. (FORR).
In the online retail market specifically, companies from the U.S. surveyed said the value of their brands aren't represented strongly in the language of the markets they serve. Of U.S. companies, only 24 percent said that customer service was consistent across all languages. In contrast, 54 percent of European companies said the experience was consistent.
"Companies transitioning to a global model -- especially companies based in the U.S. -- aren't confident that their brands' values are consistently represented 
across all the languages that they support," Forrester said in a statement. "It is necessary, then, for marketers to adopt consistent technologies and processes across regions and to develop core skills for brand consistency and content management when they expand to new local markets."
Chris Boorman, CMO at SDL, who commissioned the study, said the Internet has definitely removed the boundaries that exist between markets, but the barriers resulting from language and cultural differences has proved especially difficult for American online retailers.
The major problem, according to survey respondents were the language problems already mentioned, which represented 35 percent of the total; and the differences in cultures, also represented by 35 percent of companies. So together, language problems and cultural differences were 70 percent of the problems being encountered.
For online communication, less than 25 percent of U.S. companies used language other than English on their Web sites. That's a problem that will have to be tackled to compete globally on a consistent basis.
Another issue was the multiple location of data centers which made integration and management much more difficult. Forrester suggests companies need to run things from a central location to make operations a lot easier to run and maintain.
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