Cultural Translation and Data Management

There is always something interesting to learn when looking at marketing data. In looking at the raw data for the “Title” field within a client’s marketing database, we saw an interesting trend. The usual data was there; “VP of Marketing”, “Vice President of Sales”, “Dir. Finance”, etc, and it certainly made the need for inline data management obvious. However, there was another interesting trend that was more confusing. A reasonable portion of the fields contained values of “Mr”, “Mrs.”, “Herr”, or “Frau”.

Digging in to the data to see who it was that submitted this data, it became obvious that these were mainly from Europe. A quick chat with our European best practices team confirmed what we were beginning to suspect; the field on the landing page was asking for “Title”, and whereas in North America this is interpreted as “Job Title”, in Europe, it can just as easily be interpreted as “Salutation”.

Paying attention to data, by using reports like the Contact Group analysis dashboards can give you insights into problems, opportunities, and cultural differences before they are allowed to continue and become problematic. Data, in general, is often an overlooked, but critical area of any marketing dashboard strategy. Likewise, thinking about how questions might be misinterpreted in geographies, social groups, and industries outside of your own can allow you to find ways of phrasing questions, or approaches to marketing problems, that are more effective.