Our Analysts' Insights

So you want to be big in Japan? What does it take to promote your brand in the country and how can you avoid being seen as a sub-par performer in a market widely known for its expectations for excellence? The Japanese market is an attractive prospect for foreign companies. As of 2021, Japan accounts for 5.7% of the world’s online economic potential, despite having just 2.8% of the global Internet-connected population. This post describes seven steps you can take to ensure that your Japanese con...

A webinar audience member recently asked about a country not included in our recent “Can’t Read, Won’t Buy – B2C” survey. His question was, “Where is Algeria?” After our half-joking response – “it’s in Northern Africa, east of Morocco” – we answered seriously that the country doesn’t appear on our list of most desirable online markets for economic and technological reasons.

Recently CSA Research launched the third edition of our oft cited “Can’t Read, Won’t Buy” research. We originated this topic of research in 2006 and continue to provide companies worldwide with the reliable data they need to plan and execute effective international growth strategies. When you encounter data like this from us or any other source, put on your data scientist hat and ask these two questions: what is the population and is it a representative sample?

Consumers prefer accessing information, making online purchases, and getting technical support in their own language. That’s not a big surprise, but data from our third edition of “Can’t Read, Won’t Buy—B2C”, combined with our other research on website language support, highlights the fact that many consumers don’t have access to sites in their language, that localized websites often have major flaws, and that many must rely on English to get things they want or need.

Marketers strive to create the ultimate customer experience (CX), but we find that few spare more than a moment’s thought for how their home-market customer journey will work in other languages or countries. As a result, many businesses miss the vital requirement of engaging their global audience with content that resonates with them – not just with translated content, but with a full language experience that conveys their brand, reputation, and trustworthiness. CSA Research updated our long-r...

Consumer and digital marketers have so much to deliver that it often looks as if they’re trying to balance multiple spinning plates in the air. One of the trending initiatives that they must integrate into their strategies is the option of direct-to-consumer (DTC), in which their organizations revert to marketing, selling, and supporting individuals – rather than filtering them through third-party marketplaces such as Alibaba, Amazon, or Rakuten. This is a major shift for many medium- to large...

Ensuring that audiences in various parts of East and Southeast Asia fall in love with the games you create means adapting the characters – and the dialects they speak – appropriately for the region. Your goal is to avoid comical at best, or disastrous at worst, results for your gaming franchise.

Delivering multilingual products, services, and programs is just one component required to win over local audiences – and a small one at that. One of the biggest challenges – even for globally-savvy organizations – is learning how to balance some of the other more significant factors to ensure long-term success in local markets. Based on our current research into globalization maturity consisting of interviews and surveys of more than two hundred companies, here are three areas that companies...

Based on an examination of more than 5.5 million individual webpages from major brand websites, CSA Research has identified the languages with the greatest depth of localization. Depth follows economic opportunity, with major European and Asian languages leading the listings, but partial localization is the norm, with most brands localizing only a small portion of their content. The results provide guidance for localization groups in formulating their content strategies.

Apple recently made headlines as it became the first U.S. firm to achieve a market value of a trillion dollars. Why didn’t companies such as Microsoft – once Apple’s fiercest competitor – beat it to the punch? Apple’s resounding success is in part due to its long-standing commitment to excellent internationalization that has allowed it to meet local market expectations since the early 1980’s.