SAN FRANCISCO U.S. brands face myriad hurdles when entering new global markets, not least of which is customizing their marketing to be in sync with local mores. This challenge gets even greater when the marketer’s campaign is a sexy one.
The city of Las Vegas, whose overarching “What happens here, stays here” campaign has a message of risqué adult abandon, is facing this challenge head-on as it extends the effort into Mexico, Great Britain and Canada (which all have direct flights to Las Vegas’ McCarran Airport).
“We have to carefully adjust the volume of edginess up or down” depending on the region, says Rob O’Keefe, account director at R&R Partners, the agency for the Las Vegas tourism group.
Las Vegas joins a host of other American brands that, over the years, have customized existing U.S. marketing strategies to snag global consumers. Starbucks, which uses its laptop-friendly retail locations as a form of brand positioning, is marketing itself in traditionally tea-drinking China as an urban youth brand with retail stores that give customers a hip, Westernized experience. Also in China, Coke, in preparation for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, has exported its love of celebrities by unveiling in August a billboard filled with images of renowned Chinese athletes. And Levi’s has extended its penchant for young, attractive people in tight jeans to Web sites worldwide, but in culturally-specific contexts (e.g., an arty and minimal online design in fashionable Italy and a focus on storefronts—with techno music setting the mood—on the Mexican site, where markets are a communal experience.)
Las Vegas’ ads in other countries have previously been confined to product-oriented print and TV spots promoting the city’s wide range of resorts, entertainment options and other amenities and services. Those product ads will continue in a secondary role to the image campaign.
“Based on the success of our ‘What happens here’ marketing in the U.S., we shifted our global strategy from a purely product-education philosophy to a focus on emotional brand building,” says Rossi Ralenkotter, president and CEO of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. Global travel is expanding even as foreign travel to the U.S. is decreasing, he adds, “so we must have our brand out there to attract international travelers who are going elsewhere.”
Recent U.S. spots from the campaign, which launched in 2003, include “Be Anyone,” in which an average-looking man is shown in bars and parties coming on to women by pretending to be a variety of different professionals. In “Fortune Teller,” a woman drags her reluctant boyfriend to a psychic. When it’s the man’s turn, the fortune teller looks shocked as he implores her with his eyes to keep quiet. Both ads end with the “What happens here” tagline, “Only Vegas” logo and visit.lasvegas.com.
To help them understand how to customize the message for foreign audiences, the Las Vegas Authority reached out to travel agents, media buyers and public relations firms in other countries and is holding focus groups with travelers. Based on feedback gathered, it learned that its creative wasn’t provocative enough for the U.K., that it needed to be toned down for Mexico and could be pretty much left alone in Western Canada. (Eastern Canada was another story.)
The resulting adaptations, says Rob Dondero, evp at R&R Partners, are like the wrapping paper and ribbons on a present that remains the same (the present being a unique adult playground). Regardless, he adds, the real power of the Vegas strategy is that half the communication takes place in the consumer’s mind: “No matter what country we are in, we always leave it up to the consumer to fill in the blanks.”
For Mexico, Vegas tourism officials worried that the tagline and creative would not translate well or resonate in a society far more conservative and Catholic than the U.S.
To get 25-54-year-old Mexican men and women in the upper-income target to openly share their feelings on things such as adult play and Vegas itself, the agency traveled to three Mexican cities in early 2007 and conducted more than a dozen focus groups of five to six people each. The key, said Dondero, was grouping people who knew each other. “We found out by trial and error that knowing each other helped drive the emotional conversation [and allowed participants] to talk about personal issues,” he said. One-on-one conversations were also conducted.
The results showed that Mexicans were comfortable when the Vegas story lines fit with family customs including a focus on groups of men only or women only—and did not suggest casual sex. With that in mind, R&R’s first Mexican ad, which broke last May, starts out with two young sweethearts in Mexico talking on the phone, both unwilling to hang up. The next scene shows another conversation, but this time the young woman quickly says goodbye, to the surprise of her boyfriend. It turns out she is with girlfriends in Las Vegas (and he’s at home in Mexico). In the second spot, a young man meets a group of his male friends in a Mexican bar and tries to tell them about his first visit to Vegas, but is too excited to find the right words.
In the U.K., which is filled with provocative and explicit advertising, Las Vegas marketers found that people wanted more sex, not less. In late 2006, about a dozen focus groups of middle- and upper-income British men and women under 55 revealed that the American tagline wasn’t compelling enough for irreverent British tastes. “In the U.S. we think our slogan and ads push the envelope, [but in Britain] for our message to have the same impact we discovered that we need to make it edgier,” says O’Keefe. “We need a bolder brand statement articulating that you can do things in Vegas you can’t do anywhere else.”
To help them, adds Dondero, they’re “looking at British slang for good, clever phrases, and we’re studying the ways that British humor is different than ours.”
The agency is formulating prospective new taglines in September, which it hopes to test in focus groups this fall.The first Vegas image campaign could break in Britain by early 2008.
In Canada, where the U.S. ads have been running since last year, research conducted about three years ago showed that Western Canadians responded to the campaign pretty much the same as Americans did. But French Canada is a different story.
Based on anecdotal experience in Canada, the agency found the French Canadians’ sensibilities seem to be “more European, more open-minded” than what you see in the U.S., says Dondero. Las Vegas plans to research alternate tags and story lines for a French-language campaign there some time in 2008.
According to an Interbrand study that came out last year, “Lessons Learned from Global Brands,” “a global brand must respect local needs, wants and tastes [adapting to the local marketplace] while fulfilling a global mission.” It notes that the flexible rule-of-thumb dictates that 70 percent of the brand “remain absolutely consistent” and 30 percent “be given flexibility, market-to-market.”
Those are helpful numbers, but perhaps more helpful is the advise from Monique Tapie, representative for Global Advertising Strategies, a marketing agency that assists U.S. marketers entering international markets. Tapie notes that despite efforts to be culturally sensitive, American marketers are often seen by international consumers as too aggressive in exporting their values. She says that brands are best served when they listen more respectfully to their off-site colleagues working in the field and when, like Vegas, they are willing to customize the basic elements of their marketing.
How to Customize Your U.S. Branding Effort to Work Around the World
