Dixon Dices Up International Efforts at IRDC

Peter Dixon, senior partner and creative director at Prophet Brand Strategy (New York), closed IRDC 2013 with a keynote that showed how easy it is for retailers and designers to succeed – and fail – when expanding abroad. In “Your Brand Abroad: Adventures in Cross-Cultural Retail,” Dixon discussed how easy it is to make errors that have far-reaching consequences.

From placing the cheapest products closest to the ground in Germany (where customers expect the most inexpensive items at eye-level) to trying to ship thousands of gallons paint to China (it’s illegal), to ignoring basics, such as local holiday schedules, material availability and availability of local partners, there’s much to get wrong.

Dixon urged attendees to verify beliefs about other cultures, and spend time in-country testing assumptions against actual experience or, at least, using multiple sources to learn about local customs and procedures. And he pointed to brands such as Google, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, which have stayed globally significant and locally relevant all at once.

These simple tips sound simple, but retailers as large and successful as Walmart have failed to adequately understand local traditions, habits and preferences when expanding abroad. For example, retail greeters in Germany were met with suspicion rather than warmth and extended shopping hours ignored Germans’ habits to avoid shopping at off hours. And Best Buy failed to account for Chinese consumers’ propensity for haggling and deep discounting when it expanded, just as Hallmark faltered in France because company executives failed to note the French preference for handwritten cards without saccharine messages.

When it comes to planning new stores internationally, Dixon said, pre-planning can save hundreds of thousands of dollars of waste and years spent analyzing failing retail spaces.