The debut of J.K. Rowling’s latest novel underscores a big problem faced by global brand managers – how can you synchronize the global release of a product? Rowling’s publisher, Scholastic, struggled to keep the plot of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” secret even as it printed 12 million copies for the U.S. market alone. Non-American editions in English for other markets, translations into other languages, and the huge infrastructure of printing, warehousing, and then distributing the nearly 800-page book meant that thousands of individuals orchestrated this publishing event for months in advance. Most kept their mouths shut, afraid perhaps of Death Eaters or ferocious lawyers brandishing the non-disclosure agreements everyone involved signed.
Finally, at the witching hour on July 21, bookstores around the English-speaking world began selling the final installment in the Harry Potter series. For weeks before, journalists and readers discussed the book in the print media, online, and in the blogosphere, wondering aloud who was likely to get killed, when and by whom.
Readers waiting for the book decried the “spoilers” (including a New York Times reviewer) who gave away plot details. Elsewhere, a bookseller jumped the gun and delivered books to its customers a few days in advance of the official sale, drawing “immediate legal action” from the publisher. Scholastic also obtained a subpoena to learn who posted scanned pages of the book on Photobucket.com. That intrepid scanner could find himself on the way to the prison Azkaban.
Despite all the hand-wringing and the leaked details, no fewer than 8.3 million copies of the U.S. edition sold in the first 24 hours. The sixth book, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” sold “just” 6.9 million copies on its first day of sale. All of those who make a living by the word can envy Ms. Rowling whose status as the first billionaire novelist remains secure. The book retained its value even after details leaked out to the marketplace.
Not so with more pedestrian products like printers, mobile phones, and MP3 players. Whenever a new version comes out, the product currently in the market immediately loses some value and becomes a candidate for sale on eBay and Overstock.com. For example, once Apple’s iPhone 2 becomes available early next year, who will buy the original? And if news of the next release of an HP photo printer says it doubles print quality for the same price, the value of today’s product to a potential buyer drops precipitously. It’s in the best interest of Apple, Hewlett Packard, and every other manufacturer of a product that could quickly render worthless an entire warehouse of goods to follow the lead of Rowling and her publisher in limiting the amount of advance product information.
Marketing and brand managers face a tough problem in limiting what they say so that consumers don’t stop buying current products while waiting for the new one. And the problem is multiplied because most companies don’t have the luxury of worrying about a product release to a single country. This multinational reality means that they must produce marketing information, roll-out plans, product collateral and online content for each product.
Then, they must coordinate the translation, posting, and switching on of their multi-channel communications, marketing and sales channels across a wide array of countries. Just one un-translated product sheet could hold up the release across 25 countries in Europe. Or if one country jumps the gun and announces the product prematurely, store shelves sagging with the weight of the current product suddenly lose a lot of value.
And unlike the editors and marketers at Scholastic who have worried about the Harry Potter seven times in the last 10 years, marketing and brand managers at multinational consumer-facing companies deal with this problem repeatedly as they relentlessly send newer versions of products and replacements into the channel. Looking forward to the increasing globalization of products, companies and markets, you should definitely begin to think about how international roll-outs in many different languages will affect your product strategy. What kind of staff will you need? Who will do the work? Where is the technology that will automate these functions?
But let’s get back to Harry for a second. The webmaster at FreeTranslation.com, a site for machine translation, warned non-English readers about using MT to translate the Potter book. Encouraging them to respect copyright law, he wrote that he knows when you’re breaking the law: “We can instruct the FreeTranslation.com servers to create logs of unfound words. An ‘unfound word‘ is one that is not recognized by the translation technology. If words like ‘Hermione’ or ‘Dumbledore’ or ‘Voldemort’ appear with great frequency in our logs, we can make an educated guess about the content that is being translated.” Always watchful, ever alert. Caveat lector!
Don DePalma is the founder and chief research officer of the research and consulting firm Common Sense Advisory, and author of the premier book on business globalization “Business Without Borders: A Strategic Guide to Global Marketing.”
Network
