Electronic Retailer - June 2011 - 38

GUEST VIEWPOINT

frame. There is an annual manufacturing competition in Norway each year among 150 factories to see which can produce the same double-bent steel frame for the famous furniture company that has been in business for more than 100 years. After pitching this to media and explaining it to U.S. consumers at trade shows, U.S. consumers fell in love with a different product attribute: the unique sail on the back of each chair that can be customized to fit an owner’s home decor. That detail justified the $4,000 purchase for U.S. consumers. The media also latched onto this angle, and an article from popular media outlet Uncrate led to a purchase order by retailer Bloomingdale’s.

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.

Superior European Quality and Research
Another benefit to working with European products is the quality, which most Americans understand well. From a marketing standpoint, this is especially helpful when bringing dietary supplements into the U.S. Because regulatory guidelines are far stricter in Europe, there is more clinical research behind dietary supplements. This also means dietary supplements from Europe are more likely to have patents for Europe, Asia and the U.S., because the published clinical trials on their formulations allow them to make substantiated structure function claims. FDA attorneys for U.S. marketing companies are usually happy about published clinical studies and patents, which help substantially from a liability standpoint when marketing directly to consumers in the U.S. This is true for both patented ingredients for dietary supplements, as well as finished product formulations.

Benefit of Building a Strong Scientific Foundation
A Norwegian ingredient client had its clinical studies performed at the Karolinska Institutet – the equivalent to a medical university such as UCLA based in Sweden. Karolinska Institutet accounts for more than 40 percent of the medical academic research 38

conducted in Sweden and offers the country’s broadest range of education in medicine and health sciences. It is important that clinical studies are conducted in legitimate environments so the publication process happens more quickly. Unlike getting a consumerfocused editorial article in Prevention or USA Today, articles in peer-review medical journals could take several years to get published, or they could get completely rejected altogether if the research is faulty. Additionally, a highly esteemed medical research institution opens the door for consumer press to visit and interview researcher, and it

earns additional publicity about the efficacy of the ingredient or finished product.

What Are The U.S. Roll-Out Strategy Options?
The next point of differentiation from launching a product in Europe versus launching a product in the United States is the roll-out strategy. If we stick with a dietary supplement as the example, we are looking at three channels of distribution: direct response, multilevel marketing and retail (food/drug/ mass/specialty). It is important that European marketers understand that

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Electronic Retailer - June 2011

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