Cultural differences on the web; or how not to sell to the Europeans
Thread Title:
Cultural Differences by Country
Cultural Differences by Country
Thread Description:
AussieWebmaster asks for clarification of how you should and shouldn't sell around the world.
Its' a great subject - it's easy to change the language but there's always an issue with graphics and even layout in my experience - quote of the thread so far is
AussieWebmaster asks for clarification of how you should and shouldn't sell around the world.
Its' a great subject - it's easy to change the language but there's always an issue with graphics and even layout in my experience - quote of the thread so far is
No European country likes the "in your face" marketing. Keep it matter of factly. Dry language is preferred to WHOO HA!!!
- personally my pet peeve - although I can't even explain why - is the seeming obsession in some countries with showing pictures of the company owners.
I also strongly suspect UK and US english should be officially different languages but I never managed to get around the dupe penalty issue on that.
- Y! MyWeb
Words
Cultural differences in use of words and names is also very important. Dogpile messed up on that royally.
Chinese Love Pop Ups
The average Chinese website is the opposite of what Western people might like. It's flashy, a good site has at least 2 pop ups, the page is crammed with text, lots of advertisements and it seems everywhere there is something moving. Making it too dry and boring is probably not the best way to sell. For examples see sina.com (one of the biggest portals) or netease.com (another big portal), just make sure your computer can handle Chinese fonts.
I've always wanted to do a UK
I've always wanted to do a UK based study that delivers the same sort of information that the NNG book - E-Commerce User Experience does for the US market.
The traditional US style sales page does not work in the UK but vice versa and effective geolocation and content changing is the sensible way forward for a webmaster.
It does throw up another debate on legitimate -v- illegitimate cloaking though!
More detailed than that ...
It's even a lot more detailed than the questions about UK/US - north and south. For example, even within a small region like Scandinavia that pretty much looks like "one demographic" from the outside you'll find big differences. As an example I used to work for Scandinavia Online and as a small promotional item we did some fancy lighters with the logo. At Scandinavia Online in Norway they refused to do it because users there would see it as highly unethical because they would interpret it as pushing people to smoke! In Denmark we where shocked :)
A picture of a naked joint smoking dude would also not be seen the same way in the 3 Scandinavian countries (not that I know what situation you would ever need that for, but just an example hehe)
One thing that you REALLY have to watch out for is humor! The Danes and the Brittish pretty much share the same humor and so do other countries but many don't! A joke in one country might be seen as very offensive in another.
and...
My comments here seem to fit in with this discussion also.