Leader or laggard?
It has often been said that ‘the early bird catches the worm’ and this has been proved time and time again in the business world; but now leading research has shown that the early bird not only catches the worm, but spends less money doing so.
The aforementioned benchmark research, entitled ‘Documentation Goes Global’, was produced by the Harte-Hanks Group; a major multinational marketing solutions provider. It has found that leading (and by extension, the most successful) companies, launch new products and services complete with localised documentation, an average of three months ahead of laggard companies.
As a direct result of their foresight, leading companies are four times more likely to meet their regional launch dates and importantly, there is a much higher probability that they will achieve a controlled localisation spend.
Rather helpfully, Harte-Hanks have managed to quantify these spend levels and they make sobering reading: industry average companies have localisation spends 2.6 times higher than industry leaders but amazingly, industry laggards have localisation spends 4.6 times higher than industry leaders as a direct result of their tardiness.
As you would surmise, keeping localised marketing expenditure under control is the key to successful product launches abroad; an achievement that the best companies are able to accomplish around 98% of the time according to Harte-Hanks.
So do you want to be a leader or a laggard? If your choice is the former, then you’d better have a good Translation Services company on standby!