It’s official: the word we use to uniquely identify our industry has been co-opted.

It was bad enough that we had to explain “localization” to people at cocktail parties, as in

Localization is more than just translating from one language to another…

We now need to explain that it is not the same thing people read about in the marketing press, as in

Localization is more than just translating, and it’s different from customizing a marketing campaign…

Stealing our thunder

From the CMO Council comes a report called “Localize to Optimize Sales Channel Effectiveness.” The synopsis of the report does not mention language at all, though it does mention most of the other market concerns that language-localization addresses, viz.:

climate, geography, ethnic composition, demographics, shopper-graphics, psychographics, politics, and even neuro-sensory influences

So, while “localization” has gone mainstream, localization has (still) not gone mainstream.

Prepare yourself to do even more explaining.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a localization project manager and consultant. He is also a marketing communications writer for technology and language companies.

From NYTimes article (may require registration):

The ads will run in about 30 countries by the end of June, with media buying handled by OMD, a unit of the Omnicom Group. Intel asked for ads where it would not have to change much besides the language from country to country. Still, when Intel hired a London consultant named Ralph Bell to advise it on adjusting the ads globally, Bell suggested certain changes.

What is seen as a funny comparison in the United States, Tag told Intel, could be offensive elsewhere. One American ad shows a little girl smiling over her neat bedroom, and another shows technicians wearing spacesuit-like outfits in an immaculate Intel factory.

“Your clean room isn’t like our clean room,” it reads. But in China, that comparison can be seen as offensive. “In China, you’ve got to appear like you’re not talking down about another group for the sake of making your group look good,” Mr. Bell said. “You’ve got to be careful if they think that comes off as arrogant.” So the agency adapted that ad to show engraved jade next to an intricate Intel chip. “Your exquisite carving isn’t like our exquisite carving,” it says.

Constant vigilance, all you localization managers…

Are you localizing for domestic buyers? When the locale or region for which you’re locale-izing is actually your own, but with a demographic twist, it becomes a kind of internal localization.

This is a much-studied phenomenon (and economic driver) in the U.S., where estimates point to 46 million Hispanics with USD900 billion in spending power. Take both of those figures with a grain of salt, but there’s a market there, and several industries – notably banks and wireless companies – are internally localizing their products and services for it.

Still, what’s the point of localizing your product – toys, electronics, books, irrigation equipment, insurance policies – if your company is not spending money to promote it?

According to a study from the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies (AHAA), the top seven advertisers to U.S. Hispanics spent nearly USD500 million in 2007. However, a number of large companies well known for their ad budgets (Dell, Microsoft, Apple) are pretty stingy when it comes to promoting their products among Hispanics. More data here.

Does anybody bother with this internal localization besides U.S. companies? Do companies based in other countries need to think about internal localization, and how to promote global products internally? Does Michelin run Arabic-language commercials in France for its Algerian and Moroccan inhabitants? Does BMW run Turkish-language ads in German newspapers? Does China Mobile market its cellular service to English-language expatriates living there?

Companies like Verizon Wireless and Bank of America put in place the equivalent of an overseas office, by creating marketing, sales and product teams. They work inside the U.S., but in a different language and on different opportunities for different people from the main teams.

I don’t think we’re learning how to do this by watching companies in other countries. I think we’re making it up as we go along. It’s odd to think of localization without the international component to it, but it’s part of our job as localizers.