Customizing products for the global market requires an understanding of cultural as well as linguistic differences beyond product marketing and development for the home environment. As a leading supplier of globalization solutions, CSOFT has the knowledge and expert language resources to ensure that each consumer product is localized with linguistic accuracy and cultural correctness. CSOFT’s dedicated consumer product team has enabled some of the world's leading companies to effectively reach out to an increasingly multicultural customers as well as employees. Combining expert in-country translation with professional localization engineering, DTP and testing in China, CSOFT has unparalleled experience with consumer product localization that promotes uniform branding while allowing considerable product customization for global customers. Our centralized consumer product localization solutions also help clients reach global markets with confidence, speed, and reduced cost.

Centralized versus Decentralized
Unlike other product localization types, consumer products often need to be tailored for customers of different locales. This highly customized nature explains why many companies handle consumer product localization through their regional offices in a decentralized fashion. However, although this decentralized model addresses the customization issue, it also brings many other problems such as non-uniform branding, inefficiency, and higher cost to consumer product localization.

Non-uniform branding: By having each regional office manage localization of consumer products, companies often forego uniform branding. Managing product localization at a regional level can lead to inconsistent messages and voices being used for different locales, creating confusion about a company’s ultimate branding. For example, when customers visited a well established company’s localized website created by the regional offices, they thought they were ordering products from another firm other than the same parent company. The regional office has sufficiently changed the identity of the parent company by using varying logo designs, a different layout template and color schemes, etc.

Inefficiency: The decentralized localization model relies on different regional offices to create localized materials for websites, marketing collaterals, product packaging and documentation. Since these efforts are being done on a regional level, there is no cross language leverage that can be achieved within the localization workflow such as file prep and post-translation processing, resulting in redundant work being performed multiple times for the same task. Furthermore, since each regional office manages localization separately, there is no guarantee of uniform schedule for deliveries because these offices also have different internal planning and priorities other than localization such as sales and support.

Higher cost: Since the regional offices' primary responsibilities are not localization, they often lack knowledge about industry best practice and are less experienced with applying the latest L10N technologies to the process, resulting in substantial lost savings. Over the last decade, many L10N tools have been developed to leverage translation as well as localization workflow for improved consistency and reduced cost. Additionally, since each regional office manages translation/localization separately, there is also the redundancy of the same tasks being performed multiple times leading to a substantial increase of localization cost to the company. Furthermore, by having a decentralized localization model, a company tends to lose visibility into how and where money is spent, let alone controlling localization costs.

The CSOFT Solution

CSOFT streamlines localization for consumer products by combining expert in-country translation perfectly tailored for our clients’ regional customers and centrally managed L10N processes and technologies for maximum efficiency and cost savings. CSOFT’s expertise in adapting consumer product marketing to a multicultural audience, regardless of media, helps our clients connect with global consumers with quality. By employing the best L10N practice and technologies in dealing with the intricacies involved in adapting and customizing product information such as brochures, websites, datasheets, product documentation and multimedia presentations and integrating them with our centralized localization workflow, we are able to help our client achieve substantial savings for L10N investment and reduced time market.

Powered by CSOFT's consumer product localization solutions, our clients are able to:

• Promote better branding with a consistent voice across all languages
• Reduce localization cost
• Launch product in multiple markets simultaneously
• Shorten time to market