Objectives of knowledge management

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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