What’s normal to one audience can make no sense at all to another
I’ve recently been watching Greys Anatomy for the first time, from the start. Please, no spoilers.
One thing caught my attention recently, and this does contain spoilers, so if you don’t want to know what happens, look away now. You’ve been warned.
In recent episodes, some of the staff have been trying to buy the hospital. It’s made for an interesting storyline, but I realised that if that series was in the UK, that storyline simply wouldn’t exist.
They were talking about budgets, marketing, “poster boys/girls” that represent the hospital. All because over in the US, hospitals are big businesses. We simply don’t have that in the UK, and it reinforced to me how different audiences can have wildly opposite reactions to the same thing.
Even drinks; Fanta Orange is a completely different drink in the US than the UK. The products change based on their audiences taste.
Plenty of ad campaigns from the states wouldn’t work here.
I remember when Budweiser first started sponsoring football in England. Their ads initially were terrible, and the feedback was awful. They quickly employed someone who knew football culture, and they improved, but they didn’t understand initially that what works in the US doesn’t work here.
My wife made a point about restaurants in tourist resorts abroad. Namely Mallorca, as we lived there, and the issue was things like menus, posters and billboards. These are aimed at the British tourist market, but often just haven’t been translated correctly, which makes very little sense as half of the people that live in certain areas are British. It’s not hard to get that right by asking people that know, yet many don’t do it as they don’t think it’s important.
When you are expanding, you need to know that what worked previously might not work on a larger scale.
This crops up a lot in series of The Apprentice on BBC. The point is to get investment into the business from Lord Alan Sugar, and one stumbling block many face is their ability to scale. Especially when their initial success is based on the personality of the business owner; it’s very hard to scale one person nationally.
So think about your audience in detail, and how it can be completely different.