Electronic Retailer - June 2011 - 36

GUEST VIEWPOINT

BY LINDSEY CARNETT

America: Where European Product Marketers Want to Be

The majority of Europeans speak English to conduct business. However, something often seems to get lost in translation when discussing marketing and product roll out strategy in the United States. Europeans know they want to bring their products to the U.S. because of the sheer number of potential consumers. However, marketing in the U.S. and Europe is like comparing apples and oranges.

DRTV marketers, as well as earn retail distribution. It is wise to use Europe as a test market and bring the stats and proven success with a product to the United States. A product this exotic from another country also lends itself to great publicity, helping to earn exposure among U.S. consumers.

Homogeny as a Test Market
European product marketers are working with a smaller, more homogenous population in each country. This smaller population lends itself to determine marketing messages more quickly, earn retail distribution more easily and saturate a larger percentage of the population at a lower cost. Additionally, the media is more accessible, and the word can get out more easily through publicity, as opposed to in the United States, where it is far more difficult due to competition among similar products. On the flip side, these same European marketing environments lend themselves to act as helpful data for American marketers looking to bring products from Europe to the U.S. For example, in Sweden, an acupressure mat called the Shakti Mat sold more than 800,000 units upon its launch just before Christmas. When looking at a population of roughly 9.4 million, this unveils a distinct trend: Almost one in every nine Swedes owns an acupressure mat or bought it as a gift. This ratio was the tool that helped U.S. Shakti Mat marketers team up with

The Heterogeneous Hurdle: Don’t Sell the Steak, Sell the Sizzle
U.S. product marketers can offer the best advice to European marketers by helping them test messages surrounding their product through DRTV advertising. This is the first area where European marketers will cringe due to the cash outlay, which is much higher than advertising nationally in their respective countries. Again, it costs more to reach the United States’ larger, heterogeneous population to see which messages resonate most with American consumers. Many product attributes that the European marketers feel strongly about, such as the product packaging, the spokesperson, marketing messages or website content, simply won’t translate in the U.S. market. For a Swedish diet product, the European marketers thought it would be the thorough science that would lead to product sales in the U.S. However, the allure of having a product that the Swedes use finally available to Americans is what sold the most products. For example, when bringing the luxury Spinnaker chair from Norway to the U.S., the European marketer wanted to emphasize the chair’s double-bent steel

electronicRETAILER | June 2011

Electronic Retailer - June 2011

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