Overcoming Strategic Myopia

Modern business enterprises operate globally. But still too many corporate websites do not reflect the diversity of languages, cultures, and economic contexts in which their (local) businesses operate. Many corporate websites only provide a cursory online contribution to cater for these visitors - often amounting to little more than the local contact details.

The problem is that individuals retain the particularity of their cultural, economic, and linguistic context when visiting your website. To confront them with a website in a language other than their own, to communicate from an economic, cultural, and linguistic perspective alien to their own can be at best off-putting, and worst, alienating.

(Contrast this with the effort given to profiling and providing content for core-country target audiences.)

The Impact
And this presents genuine problems to corporate marketing and communication executives "on the ground".

• Failure to address local context can be taken as evidence of lack of understanding of local needs and requirements
• Poor online communication can retard or render nugatory other sales and marketing efforts aimed at the target audiences
• Failure to appreciate diversity can provide unnecessary grounds for sales objections

The Reasons for Myopia
If this is the case, why do companies poor with the poor online service to EMEA operations? The reason is that the poor service is grounded in a corporate strategic myopia; a myopia arising from a number of factors including:

• "Commmon-or-garden" (sic) parochialism
• The perception of there being a parent-child relationship between the core operating centre and EMEA operations.
• A failure to appreciate the growth potential of markets away from the core country.

The argument for a greater strategy appreciation of the importance online of EMEA operations is not helped by the "self-fulfilling prophecy" of current website usage. When EMEA visitors to the corporate website are poorly catered for, they visit fewer pages, return less often, and have an elevated "bounce rate".

The Solution
Overcoming corporate strategic myopia is not an easy task. In the face of this myopia, EMEA operations find it almost impossible to "bootstrap" their online operations - elevating their importance and drawing down greater resource for development - and they find it incredibly difficult to get their needs articulated, let alone heard, at the highest level.

In the end, the drive for change has to come from the top, to provide the appropriate level of support and resourcing that is necessary to remove the handicapping of EMEA operations online. The question is whether executives can move beyond their own myopia - beyond their own parochialism - to embrace the genuine competitive opportunities that globalisation brings to modern enterprises.

There is a phrase in the UK - "in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king". With so few corporate websites willing to open their eyes to the potential benefits from catering effectively for EMEA visitors, ambitious top executives would do well to hear the message it brings.

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