4 Tips for Branding your International Company

It is one thing to build brand recognition in a country where you are familiar with the language and local customs. It is quite another to tackle international brand-building in unfamiliar territory.

This very effort has led to some of the most famous and often-repeated international brand-building disasters in history. Of course, no company sets out to unintentionally build brand awareness through messing up!

With these four tips, you can begin to build your international brand with both confidence and competence.

Work with a talented translator

Some of the best-known international branding oopses have arisen due to grey areas in language interpretation and translation.

Here, it is also critical to differentiate between formal and conversational versions of the national language as well as local dialects that may introduce subtle linguistic variances.

This will help you avoid sinking your brand's reputation before it has even had a chance to shine.

Use local language keywords rather than translations

International branding often falls flat when approached from a big picture perspective. Take India, for example. English and Hindi are the two official national languages. But there are 22 other languages spoken, plus more than 720 dialects.

So how do you develop brand awareness in India? Very carefully! The best results may come by taking your brand development region by region, using locally recognized keywords where both the meaning and interpretation is known and trusted.

Do plenty of advanced market testing

Unless you personally are a native speaker in the international language, even working with a native speaker on translation and interpretation can still leave you exposed to unwitting mistakes.

You can catch these early by doing market testing with sample groups of your ideal customer base. If there is anything amiss in your branding, you will hear about it in time to fix it in advance.

Be aware of local laws and regulations regarding branding and marketing

In some countries, using a sweepstakes or contest to promote your product is illegal.

Also, some countries are very strict about product composition, banning certain chemicals or materials in products marketed to certain age groups or the general public.

For best results in international branding, do as much advance research and testing as you can to be sure your brand is received positively from day one.

William Doonan is a tax law and legal expert in New York.