Localization 2.0

A box of Patchi really hits the spot when paired with the finest from ChangYu and if its been a long day follow it down with a United Spirits chaser.

Any idea what I am talking about? Probably not, these are three of five companies that Wolff Olins, the consultants behind the London 2012 Olympics, believe will be amongst the newest global brands. Patchi is the Lebanese answer to Godiva, ChangYu China’s largest wine producer and United Spirits India’s biggest liquor company.

The point of course is that the competitive horizon is going to exponentially shift (as the economy returns) to non US centric organizations (with aims not least of which are American Market dominance of course).

I get this quote from the FT – but it sums up the idea nicely …

“It used to be possible to be a global brand by dominating the U.S. market,” Melanie McShane, a strategist at Wolff Olins, told the Financial Times. “That’s changing rapidly. Now you have to be number one in Asia.”

Interestingly enough I think companies are still really struggling with the idea of global competition at a fundamental level and as Asia stabilizes and once again looks like the future king of commerce being able to compete globally will become an absolute survival requirement.

Saw an interesting article (click here) today regarding the announcement of a project to translate five classic books of Chinese Confucianism – “Wujing“. I think the article even made me a little melancholic, truth be told.

The translation work on the project is about 1 million words and the guiding body has allowed an estimated three and a half years to complete them. Now of course not many user guides or online support materials could claim to be quite as complex as these enlightened works, but it does act as a reminder to just what complexity is involved when you really want to be clear about what is being said.

I have long harbored a hope that technology based efficiency will once again refocus the industry on quality – of course not the quality needed for these rarefied texts – but quality of marketing and positioning that can empower a real impact on the global success of organizations. Reading about a new example of the highest level of translation provides a said reflect on the resource burning demands that drive the industry and communication in general today.

As MT, XML, Communities and other alternative resources help bring down the costs and time of going global I wonder if an industry built on commodity costs will ever again find the arguments to take these costs savings as the ROI basis for reinvesting some of the savings in quality as a partial effort to reengage with the roots of artistic and thoughtful consideration that originally spawned the loc industry. Will the time saved by these new processes be spent on improving quality and communication or just taken as another discount?

Another interesting point of the story was just how much information is still unavailable to the world at large and the effect that that information could have on an empowered accessible world. For every Chinese entrepreneur that could learn from Steve Job’s published content on brand and company management, there is a Steve Jobs who could benefit from Confucianism. And I just can not help but to conclude directly or indirectly we would be better off for both interactions.