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4 

Highly localised websites.  Country-  specific websites with language translation; they 

also include other localisation efforts in terms of time, date, postcode, currency  formats, etc.

5 

Culturally customised websites. Websites reflecting complete ‘immersion’ in the culture 

of target customer segments.

Deciding on the degree of localisation is a difficult challenge for managers, since while it has 

been established that local preferences are significant, it is often difficult to balance costs 

against the likely increase or conversion rate. In a survey published in Multilingual (2008), 

88% of managers at multinational companies stated that localisation is a key issue, with 76% 

of them saying that it is important specifically for international customer satisfaction. Yet, 

over half of these respondents also admitted that they allocate only between 1% and 5% of 

their overall budget for localisation.

An indication of the importance of localisation in different cultures has been completed 

by Nitish et al. (2006) for the German, Indian and Chinese cultures, assessing localised web-

sites in terms not only of content, but of cultural values such as collectivism, individualism, 

uncertainty avoidance and masculinity. The survey suggests that without cultural adapta-

tion, confidence or flow falls, so resulting in lower purchase intent.

A further aspect of localisation to be considered is search engine optimisation (SEO, see 

Chapter 9), since sites which have local language versions will be listed more prominently 

by local versions of the search engines. Many specialist companies have been created to help 

manage these content localisation issues for companies, for example agency Web Certain 

maintains a forum advising on localisation (

www.multilingual‑seo.com

).

One example of the effect of localisation on conversion rates is provided by MySpace CEO 

Mike Katz, who stated in NMA (2008) that: ‘All the 27 sites are localised, we don’t believe that 

one size fits all. We know that from the first day we localise in any language, we triple our  sign- 

 ups on original users.’ In 2008, 45 million of the 130 million MySpace users were outside the 

US; new sites were planned for Russia, India, Poland and Korea, each requiring a local version.

To explore the implications of globalisation for  consumer-  orientated companies, refer to 

Case study 4.1.

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