Ok, so you probably won’t find the above in any legitimate historical tome. But case studies, at least in their more familiar guise as “success stories,” are as old as human history itself.

The term “case study” means something different to the scientific and business communities. In broad language—and as it applies to both fields—the case study is an in-depth investigation of or research report on one individual, group, event, or community, real or imagined.

The business case study apparently originated at Harvard Business School nearly 85 years ago. Necessity being the mother (or at least the midwife) of invention, its birth resulted from a dearth: more specifically, from a lack of appropriate textbooks for the school’s graduate program.

The Harvard Business School is now noted for its case studies-based interactive learning program, which helps students understand real-world lessons in management. The faculty works with business leaders at companies worldwide, interviewing them and then writing in-depth accounts of exactly what they did to achieve their success.

As you already know, case studies can be found everywhere (beyond the Fertile Crescent even), crossing business, industry, and educational thresholds. Though companies may have their own unique criteria for what constitutes a “success,” case studies generally include the following information about the customer or client:

• Appropriate background information/overview
• Discussion of its business and/or technology challenge
• Why it chose a particular solution
• A description of said solution
• Benefits of the solution, both quantitative and qualitative

One area where case studies often differ from one company to the next is how much detail, if any, the organization provides about the roadblocks it faced along the way. Some feel more comfortable telling the story in the broadest strokes possible, while others don’t hesitate to point out actual setbacks or issues faced. The latter usually place a high value on transparency and/or imparting the lessons learned from the experience.

That’s not to say that this last bunch is necessarily more “benevolent” than the former; it’s just more likely that they understand the advantages, financial and otherwise, of a good story, even one that may show the obvious flaws of a particular strategy.

Most people can relate to mistakes (we’re only human, after all). The important differentiator between success and failure may be in how those mistakes are handled. The advent of social media and instantaneous communications are proving this over and over on nearly a daily basis.

Even if a case study is transparent and forthcoming about failures as well as successes, it still doesn’t tell the entire story. With the notable exception of Harvard Business School, mentioned earlier, most case study templates simply don’t allow for the space necessary to do so.

In his article entitled “The Downside of Business Success Stories,” marketer Daniel Faintuch points out the limitations of success stories in business magazines, for instance:

While there are obvious differences between a success story in a periodical and a corporate-sponsored case study, they have at least one thing in common: if they are written well and engagingly presented, they’ll probably get read more. If this sounds pretty obvious—well, to some extent, it is.

But the simple idea that good writing can stand on its own, no matter what form it takes, may not always be a guiding principle. It can get overlooked, for instance, during the internal process of picking and choosing which case studies to include in a company’s portfolio.

While the ultimate goal may be to pique your readers’ interest enough that they want to buy your product, service, or solution, the way down that eventual path starts with a good story—be it entertaining, educational, thought-provoking, or spine-tingling.

Our ancestors would agree.

By Jolene Dobbin

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It’s tricky, but it’s important. That’s because you and we are often trying to communicate about highly technical products to not-so technical people. They might be very smart people with advanced degrees and whizzes at whatever it is they do. But that doesn’t mean they know bupkis about storage interfaces, including multifunction, Fibre Channel, RAID, iSCSI, and SCSI adapters.

Yet these people are often the decision makers when it comes to buying what you and we are selling. If we’re not careful, prospective customers will find themselves browsing through our brochures, white papers, and websites—and never know what we’re talking about.

This can lead to lost sales. Not to mention lost jobs.

At Harding Marketing, these difficulties led us to think about practical ways to help our writers write technical copy for non-technical readers.

First, know your audience. If your audience is all engineers, no problem. Usually.

But what if they’re ophthalmologists and you’re trying to describe some new device for laser eye surgery? Or what if they’re Chief Financial Officers who need to approve funding for a new data center? In that case, if the writers start listing the benefits of virtual storage before the readers have even heard of virtualization, we’re headed for the abyss.

This same principle explains why school teachers usually cover addition and subtraction before they get into fractions.

So before writing something like a networking brochure, we try to find out if the audience knows the difference between networking with old college chums and networking with blade switches (not to be confused with switch blades).

Next, define your terms. This can get touchy because none of us wants to offend readers by explaining stuff they already know. Stuff like a PC. Or a USB.

But what about SOA? Wikipedia says, “In computing, service-oriented architecture (SOA) has different… and openly-debated definitions.” This means our readers might have a different definition than we do. Or no definition at all. The trick is to make sure every reader knows what we mean.

For acronyms and other clumps of initials, the standard practice is to spell them out the first time, then follow up with initials in parentheses. For example: “service-oriented architecture (SOA)…” But sometimes that’s not enough. For a Hewlett-Packard white paper, one Harding writer explained SOA in a way that even a CEO could understand:

BTW, if we fear that sophisticated readers will think a definition is offensively tautological, we sometimes begin by saying, “As you know, service-oriented architecture (SOA) has been called… “

And as you know, a glossary is often a good place to define new terms. No one takes umbrage when we include one. And when they come across something unfamiliar, everyone is grateful for it.

One caution: We try to make sure our definition is either the standard one or else clearly explained. There are, for instance, about as many definitions of “cloud computing” as there are clouds. An explanatory phrase or two can put a silver lining around your copy.

Finally, ask a non-techie to read it. It’s SOP to run technical copy past the engineers for accuracy. But we can often learn more if we run it past an MBA—or even (gasp) a history major. If they stumble over a word or phrase, the target CEO might also stumble. And that might mean it’s time for a rewrite.

At our Harding Marketing offices in San Jose, California; Grenoble, France; and points in between, we write marketing copy for clients as technical as Hewlett-Packard, Google, Symantec, and many others. Some of it’s intended for engineers and other techies. Some of it’s intended for the rest of us. We work hard to make all of it clear, direct, and understandable.

If that’s the kind of copy you need for an upcoming marcom project, we’d be delighted to talk with you about it. Technically speaking, that’s our job.

To reach us in San Jose, click michelle_contreras@hardingmarketing.com. Or for our Grenoble office, try stephane_labartino@hardingmarketing.com.

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Most of us, though, need guidelines to help us build, climb, or cook. It’s the same with blogging. Technically, you can create, write, and edit a blog without guidelines, but it’s probably not prudent.

Having guidelines is especially helpful if you’re creating a B2B blog like this one. We’re learning this here at Harding Marketing, as we go through the process of creating the very blog that you’re reading right now. We’ve written some guidelines, but we’ll need to expand them as we learn new things along the way.

Here are some of the things we’ve discovered. Guidelines for blogging can help you:

1. Decide who will be writing the content. Blogs are written by a variety of different people within an organization. Some companies only allow C-level executives to write blog posts, and others encourage everyone to pitch in. Still others only use professional writers. Deciding early on who will or will not contribute can save a lot of time and energy up front.

2. Think about the content of your content. In real estate, the three things that matter most are “location, location, location.” In marketing, the adage is “audience, audience, audience.” Dance legend Twyla Tharp once said, “It is extremely arrogant and very foolish to think that you can ever outwit your audience.” She was definitely onto something; this is a good maxim to follow no matter what business or industry you’re in.

   Ultimately you’re creating blog articles that you hope will benefit your audience. So think about the language you use when speaking to and about that audience. Then, add those considerations to your guidelines.

3. Set appropriate reader expectations. Whether you’re writing niche-specific content or a broad-spectrum blog about your overall business, setting reader expectations is important. Transparency is essential, especially if you’re writing for a well-known company. In its externally available blogging code of conduct, HP notes that “blogs are written by a variety of employees at different levels and positions in the company, so you can expect many viewpoints.” It then goes on to tell readers what else to expect.

4. Get in front of your content; don’t react to it after the fact. It’s better to act than to react, at least in the case of blog content. Reacting can not only waste enormous amounts of time, but potentially damage your company too.

   It should be clear, for instance, which subjects are absolutely off limits. It’s much easier to address this before it happens than to delete an already published post. The Internet is an accomplished trailblazer, leaving virtual breadcrumbs of content everywhere it goes.

5. Establish a system for monitoring/approving comments. Having such a system in place helps you avoid spinning your wheels as you try to determine who’s responsible for these tasks. In our world of instantaneous communications, this is especially important: delaying approval of or a response to a comment could result in a disenchanted reader at best, and a lost sale at worst. Well, obviously there are even worse things, but you get the picture.

6. Determine how to respond to comments. Speed is not the only factor when it comes to comments. What you’re actually going to say is pretty important as well. Here are just a few questions to consider:
   
   • What type of response will you provide?
   • From whom in your company will it come: can anyone respond to comments, or only a select few?
   • What is the level of detail your response to comments should have? What about the tone of that discourse?
   • Will you wait to respond until you have several comments on the same subject, or will you always strive to address each one individually?

The above six items are just a few things to think about as you draft your guidelines. Some organizations may want to include legal policies or detailed writing tips in their guidelines as well; others may be fine with short, yet handy bulleted lists of dos and don’ts.

What about your own corporate blog guidelines? Is there anything that works for you that you’d like to share?

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So it’s not surprising that graphic designers—those free-spirited folks who make your brochures and websites look so spiffy—are offended by typographical rules. Therefore let’s not call these rules. Instead, let’s call them guidelines. Or helpful advice. Or typographical tips to enhance legibility and make your marketing communications more effective. In short, let’s call them the type of thing that can be helpful.

Get it? Type of thing?

Okay. Let’s skip the weak jokes and concentrate on a few practical realities about typography in marketing communications.

1. Keep it short. Reverse is generally not a good idea for body copy, but it can work just fine for headlines or short captions.
2. Use strong, bold faces. There is a place for delicate, arty type, but that place is not in reverse.
3. Make it big. Small type sometimes works okay in reverse. But most times, big type works even better.
4. Finally, if we’re using reverse type over a four-color photo, we make sure to do (a) and (b) and (c). And even then, it’s risky. That’s because the slightest problem with color registration can make reverse type as blurry as memories of your fourth birthday.

Practical reality #2: Big type is easier to read than small type. We realize that’s not a totally helpful tip. Like, how big is big enough if your copy will sometimes pop up on a 10″ mini notebook screen and sometimes on a monster 27″ monitor? But we still think it’s important to consider whether or not your words might be more effective in larger type.

BTW, trying to follow this advice often encourages us to cut copy, which is nearly always a good thing.

Practical reality #3: Too many characters per line is a bummer. How many characters are too many? Various authorities offer various opinions, with no firm answer. At Harding, our own guideline for readability says there should be no more than 90 characters per line, including spaces.

Practical reality #4: When you print type over a black and white photograph (or almost any pattern), whole words can disappear in a haze of nearly identical values. One protection is to use outline letters. That way, even if black type winds up over a very dark background, the white outline will make the words legible. If you’re printing in reverse, the opposite is true; giving your white letters a black outline will help the words show up.

PRACTICAL REALITY #5: ALL CAPS MIGHT BE EVEN HARDER TO READ THAN REVERSE. AT HARDING, WHEN WE WANT TO SET COPY IN ALL CAPS (LIKE WHEN WE’RE TRYING FOR THE WESTERN-UNION LOOK), WE FOLLOW THE SAME GUIDELINE WE FOLLOW FOR REVERSE TYPE: KEEP IT SHORT.

Practical reality # 6: When your words are going global, there are special issues to think about. For one, copy translated from English can run up to 40% longer in other languages. I took a walk, for example, becomes, Ich habe einen Spaziergang machen when it ambles into Germany. Maybe even worse, a beautiful design using Latin letters (like these) might not work as well in the Cyrillic, Greek, Sanskrit, Kanji, Arabic, or other alphabets.

Unfortunately, there are also practical realities numbers 7 through maybe 1,027. But this blog is too short to include them all, and you’re too busy to read them anyhow. So let’s just end by saying that we’d be delighted to discuss typography with you at any time. And if that leads to the opportunity to set some legible, attractive, and persuasive type for your next marcom project, even better.

To set up a conversation, just open your email and type in michelle_contreras@hardingmarketing.com. Or to reach our office in Grenoble, France, try stephane_labartino@hardingmarketing.com. They’re the type who’ll respond almost instantly.

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I’m referring here to corporate-speak: words that are technically English, in that you’ll probably find them in the dictionary, but whose primary definition rarely has much in common with its business meaning. Words like “leverage,” “stakeholder,” and “aspirational.”

For instance, Merriam-Webster defines “stakeholder” first as “a person entrusted with the stakes of bettors.” But its corporate-speak meaning is closer to the arcane third definition: “one who is involved in or affected by a course of action.” (Um, wouldn’t that include anyone who breathes?)

There are many reasons for this process of undermining the English language, some simple, some sinister: habit, laziness, fear, intentional obfuscation, complete cluelessness. And while the phenomenon spans industries, it thrives best in companies that have a layer—or, even better, multiple layers—of bureaucracy; middle management positions are especially good incubators of the Corporatese Americanus virus.

To extend the virus metaphor, no one in the corporate world is immune to the disorder. Well, almost no one. You can, however, fortify yourself with translations so that when you do come across such terms (or, worse, find yourself using them), you’ll at least have some protection.

Here, for your amusement, edification, or consternation, is a short list of corporate-speak terms:

• Customer delight: Ugh. What happened to good ol’ customer satisfaction? 100% customer satisfaction is no longer enough; nothing less than 130% customer delight will do. Delight is, of course, synonymous with satisfaction. But it’s an over-the-top satisfaction, the kind a 5-year-old feels when eating an ice cream cone. The term is supposed to evoke that same feeling in adults, but somehow it underwhelms. What’s next? Customer rapture?
• Any percentage over 100%: Speaking of 130%, what makes perfectly intelligent, seemingly rational beings think that the laws of physics don’t apply to them? Or at least to their language. It is physically not possible for a thing to comprise more than 100% of itself. At least not here on Earth. No word yet from the Andromeda Galaxy.
• Bandwidth: Actual meaning: a range within a signal’s frequency, wavelength, or energy; or a system’s data transfer capacity. Corporate-speak meaning: availability to complete work. Enough said.
• Synergy: A favorite across industries, probably because it sounds really impressive. Its meaning has something to do with the behavior of whole systems not being predictable based on the separately observed behaviors of the systems’ separate parts. Corporate-speak meaning: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But it means much more than that. Only those who can fully articulate what Buckminster Fuller (who coined the term) meant should be allowed to use it.
• Talking points: Talking points used to be called “words” or “bullet points” until the early 21^th century, when they merged with “points to discuss” to become a popular corporate-speak term. (The term is also highly appropriate for actual animated, cute little talking points…like Pac-Man.)
• Drill down: It would be shocking if this term was not used at least 130% in marketing communications collateral for the oil and gas industries. For the rest of us, let’s use understand, grasp, or comprehend to get to the crux of the matter.

This is obviously just a fraction of the words and phrases that are circulating out there, waiting to land on some unsuspecting host. You may not be able to avoid them, but consider that there is usually a perfectly good synonym available to help fight them off.

What about you? Have you any corporate-speak examples to share? Feel free to post some in the comments section below.

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You’re not alone. A large contingent of the population, especially outside the corporate world, doesn’t really know what a mission statement is. And probably a good portion of that group actually includes marketing professionals.

But writing a mission statement isn’t as Marketing 101-ey as you’d think.

So this might be a good place to attempt to define a mission statement: A mission statement, sometimes referred to as a corporate statement, is a short, written statement that identifies a company’s official goals and principles.

Ideally, it should guide a company’s every action and decision by defining its overreaching objective. It should also be the most accurate, yet succinct answer to the questions:

• What are we trying to accomplish?
• For what reasons are we selling our product/solution/service?
• Why do we even exist? (existential musings aside, try to think beyond the clichéd here; it’s not just about making a profit)

Here are some tips, and it’s not an all-inclusive list by any means, to help guide you along in writing a mission statement:

• Think big, but focus narrowly. Try to whittle down your grandiose, sweeping vision to its most essential elements: you may indeed want to be the world’s largest and most successful consumer electronics superstore, but what is it about your unique qualifications that will help you get there? What will you specifically be giving your customers that your competitors can’t or won’t? What can you offer or do that’s better, cheaper, or faster?
• Be short, sweet, and direct. Okay, maybe not “sweet,” unless you’re a confectioner or chocolatier. Lengths of mission statements range anywhere from a few words to several paragraphs. Although your organization’s goals should dictate the length, you should strive to be as brief as possible without sacrificing inspiration.
  • The Humane Society’s mission statement gets directly to the heart of the matter, and reads a lot like a well-focused tagline: “Celebrating Animals, Confronting Cruelty.”
  • So does Google’s: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

• Write for the long haul. Your mission statement should be just as applicable three years or a decade from now as it is today. This doesn’t mean it should remain timeless simply for the sake of being timeless; during certain periods of upheaval (including events like mergers, acquisitions, or restructuring) you may in fact need to review it for relevance.
• Display it publicly. You don’t need to take out an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle or secure a billboard on the Times Square Jumbotron. But your mission statement should easily be available for your customers, partners, and even competitors to view. Many organizations post theirs on the website’s “About us” page.
• Include others. You may be the only one responsible for assigning it or writing your company’s mission statement, but that doesn’t mean you should go it alone. Plan on involving internal employees as well as externally based partners and associates, if applicable, in the brainstorming and/or researching phase. Differing perspectives may bring a fresh focus and help you gain valuable insight into your company’s goals.
• Take the necessary time to complete. Don’t speed through the process. You should plan on spending time doing research, reading company literature, conducting interviews with the right people, and then drafting several versions if necessary.

There are, of course, other things to consider. What works for one company or industry, for instance, may not work for another. Every organization’s culture is unique. And that’s fine. In fact, a mission statement should encapsulate, and celebrate, that uniqueness.

This is why you probably shouldn’t write your statement using something like The Flag Patented Mission Statement Generator. Although you might want to check out that link for its humorous take on the gobbledygook of corporate-speak.

Speaking of corporate-speak, stay tuned for next week’s edition of MarComments, where we’ll show you how to translate corporate-speak into American English. Well, we’ll provide a few entertaining examples at least.

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In marcom copy, the distinction between features and benefits is vital because most people don’t actually care about a volume control. What they care about is volume.

This demonstrates one of marketing’s greatest truths: Most customers think benefits are more important than features. It seems simple, yet there is confusion, although not among marcom professionals such as you and we. But others less highly evolved have been known to blur the lines—which is a nice way of saying they sometimes get it all wrong.

Engineers, for example, are among the smartest people in class. But engineers know about engineering, not marketing. Thus, engineers tend to write marcom copy like, “The new Quad 2830 has Fashwander connections with solid state portal facilitation.” They seem to think the benefits of solid state portal facilitation are obvious—and they probably are to engineers. But they’re not always so obvious to customers.

Sales VPs can also fall in love with features while ignoring benefits. So can CEOs. And marcom writers. That’s a shame because benefits are where the action is. Benefits are the reason people send in the coupon, ask for more information, or have a sales team stop by. Benefits are why people jump up in their cubicles and shout, “Wow, this just what we need. Let’s go buy one right away.” Or words to that effect.

Benefits are so important that we’ve developed a duo of handy tips for Harding writers to use when they create marcom copy.

Tip 1: Features are about the product. If someone writes about a product’s size or power or connectors, someone is writing about its features. Features can be exciting, such as, “Now with portal facilitation.” Or they can be boring, such as, “Comes in a cardboard box.” Problems arise when a feature sounds like a benefit. This leads us to:

Tip 2: Benefits are about the customer. Benefit copy explains what a feature does to make the customer’s life better. In short, benefits answer life’s most basic questions:

• What problem does this solve for me?
• How will it make my job easier?
• Will it get me promoted to CIO in time for my class reunion?

Solid state portal apps run cooler is a benefit. Even better is what textbooks call the benefit of the benefit: That means you can cut energy costs by 30%.

“That means,” BTW, is a mindlessly simple, but useful, device to segue from features to benefits. And almost any sentence that includes “you” is likely to include a benefit. For example, you can reduce downtime. Or you can make backups automatically. Or you can have your cake and eat it, too.

So without meaning to get all preachy and didactic, a benefit is always about what a feature does to help you, the customer. But what does all this do to help you, the marcom executive?

By highlighting benefits, you can preside over more effective marcom copy. And that means you can enhance the success of your company. And that means management will smile upon you. And you already know what that means.

To see some examples of how we highlight benefits in marcom copy, please visit us at hardingmarketing.com.

And while we’re on the subject of benefits, please give us the benefit of your thoughts in the Comment box below.

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But what about a piece of effective marketing communications? How long does it take to create a really good brochure? A data sheet? Or a case study?

When you think of everything that can mess with your schedule, it’s amazing that any marcom gets produced at all—let alone on time. On the other hand, people who manage marcom projects need some reasonable understanding of the time they’ll need to get jobs out the door.

Perhaps we can help. At Harding Marketing, we’ve developed a few guidelines for timelines. They’re not carved in stone, but they do help us answer the troubling question: How long is all this going to take?

We start by breaking the problem into its component parts.

Planning and Preparation: This is where you work with a Harding project manager to plan the assignment, gather information, develop a strategy, establish a budget, and set a due date.

• Total time: Usually a week. But it can be super-fast if necessary.

Kickoff Call: You get your people and we get ours. Then we all join in on a conference call where your guys explain to our guys what’s needed, pass along information, and answer questions.

• Total time: Sometimes a week or more is needed to gather your people. Sometimes it’s as little as an hour. (Our people gather whenever you want.)
• Kickoff calls usually last an hour.

Familiarization: Even when writers have worked on the same kind of assignment before, they still need a little time to review materials and check sources.

• Total time: Usually a day for them to sort things through.

Outlines: When an outline is needed, it’s like copy: The time to write one depends on its length.

• Total time: About a day to outline an eight-page piece, another day for each additional eight—more or less.

Outline Approval: This depends on the answer to two questions: How many people are involved? And how quickly will they get back to you? Come to think of it, the second question is all that matters.

• Total time: It can be done in a day, but figure seven.

First Draft: Hemingway said he tried for “200 well-chosen words a day.” That pace won him a Nobel prize. Harding writers are way more productive, shooting for about 400 – 600 per.

• Total time: About one day for every page. That’s four days to write a short brochure—maybe two weeks for a long one.
• Nobel prizes take longer.

Copy Reviews: See comments following: Outline Approval (above).

• Total time: From one day to a week. But we’ve seen comments come back in an hour.

Revisions: If the first draft was nearly perfect (our writers are very good), revisions can be lickety-split.

• Total time: Even so, we like to allow a week for revisions. But it all depends.

Layout and Production: Harding’s designers and production people are not only good, they’re speedy, meaning:

• Total time to design and produce a finished piece following copy approval is about a week,
• Including your approvals.

And that’s pretty much it.

But even with the best-laid plans, there will be occasional emergencies—times when you need a bit of writing written right now. Or before EOD. Or noon, tomorrow. When it happens, it happens. And we get it done.

Oh, and one more thing: If you’re wondering about this edition of MarComments, it took almost a whole day. A Saturday.

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In a global economy, brochures, data sheets, sales guides, and other marketing communications are often written in one language (let’s say American English), then read in another. Along the way, writers spend hours trying to find just the right words—which end up with translators who manage to find just the wrong ones.

And it doesn’t take a whole brochure to mess things up. There’s a true story of how a simple slogan like “Finger lickin’ good” was translated into Chinese, quickly becoming, “Eat your fingers off.”

And during a 60 Minutes interview with Vladimir Putin, a translator made it sound as if Mike Wallace had just called the Russian President a hippopotamus. Wallace was shipped off to the Gulags and never heard from again.

Okay, that wasn’t totally true. But it helps make a point: Writing and translating marcom copy is tres problematique. At best, translations are like listening to the violin part played on an oboe; it doesn’t sound quite right, but you can still get the idea. At worst, they’re like listening to the violin part played by someone who never took lessons.

Unfortunately, preventing all translation errors is probably impossible. That makes it doubly important to prevent the ones we can. With that in mind, here are a few helpful (but not infallible) guidelines that help Harding writers avoid translation confusion.

Write short, declarative sentences. For most of us, simple sentences work best even when we’re writing in our native tongue; when we’re being translated into someone else’s, they’re almost mandatory. When sentences get too complex, translators have a tough time figuring out which verb goes with what noun and who’s the antecedent of whatever.

Avoid contractions. We’re talking about words like you’ve. Or don’t. Or should’ve, could’ve, would’ve. It seems contractions are very difficult for translators to cope with—especially those digital translators that work sans human intervention.

Admittedly, MarComments scatters contractions willy-nilly. But when our writers write marcom copy for translation, our editors in San Jose and Grenoble, France, review it to eliminate any stumbling blocks.

Humor is hard. This is sad, but true. Okay, when Stan dumps a bucket on Ollie, the laughter is universal. But wordplay depends on the words—which aren’t the same in other languages. And jokes are hard enough to tell in one language, much less in five or six. So at Harding Marketing, we avoid using humor. As you’ve probably noticed.

Skip American cultural references. Many readers in Marseilles can discuss the presidency of Pierre Mendès-France but have never heard of Warren G. Harding. Obvious, right? Yet many cultural references are so deeply embedded that we forget that people in other countries don’t have a clue about our local songs, TV shows, sports stars, and celebrity scandals. The following incomplete list helps us remember what to avoid when writing marcom copy for translation.

• The whole nine yards, double play, pickup game, and any reference to American sports or sports stars. Yao Ming might be okay.
• Anything political. You wouldn’t go there anyhow, but keep it in mind.
• Assumptions about the readers’ living standards, income, value systems, etc. They might not share the amenities we take for granted. Like parking meters.
• And most important, American pop culture. True, Angelina Jolie is probably known everywhere. But Rush Limbaugh isn’t. There is no absolute rule on this—only eternal vigilance.

None of this would be terribly important if marcom materials weren’t terribly important to the success of your business. And come to think of it, to ours.

Because we work with so many global companies, Harding copy is frequently written with translation in mind. “HP Virtualization Bundles” was written knowing that it would be translated into seven languages, plus UK English, which almost counts as an eighth. Click here to see how it turned out in German.

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