October 2009 – Feature: Marketing Beyond Borders: A Delicate Dance

Seven Steps to International DRTV Success

By Peter Sengenberger

Ask any seasoned marketer what their biggest area for sales growth is and they’ll often say–without hesitation–”international.” Ask them how they plan to address the challenge and you may get a blank stare.

The appeal of international expansion is hard to overstate; together, the key DRTV markets in Asia, Europe and Latin America not only contain more customers than all of North America, but they’re also growing at a faster rate.

To give yourself the best chance for international success, take a thoughtful, systematic approach and make sure you’ve got your bases covered by following these seven essential steps to success:

1 Determine Your Goals
What plans do you have for your products in your chosen markets? TV only? Retail? Live shopping? Deciding where you want your campaign to go informs your most critical up-front decisions–the decisions that will shape your overseas business: whether to enter the new market alone or with consultants, a full-service distributor or a combination thereof. What’s your positioning going to be in the marketplace? What’s your DRTV supposed to accomplish in the grand scheme of things? This isn’t a time to be modest. Think big.

As a marketer, it’s often tempting to rush the product on air–even with a dry test–just to see how it does and then decide on the bigger questions after your show has been up and running for awhile. The trouble with this approach is that once you’re on air and expanding your media buy, it’s hard to make changes to the campaign that might affect your ability to enter into other channels, to influence pricing or to release successive versions of the product or show. Without prior planning, you could be limiting your ability to market your products over the long term.

2 Know Your Market
It isn’t news to experienced marketers that in-depth market knowledge is crucially important, especially when exploring international markets. Answer the following checklist of key questions about your target international markets and you’ll be well on your way:

Is this product legal in the markets we’ve chosen to enter? Are the claims made in the infomercial or spot legal to air? How are products in this category perceived in the target market? How does that perspective differ, if at all, from that in North America? What does the competitive landscape look like?

Finally, where are products like ours sold successfully? DRTV? Retail? Online?

If you and your team can’t answer these questions to your satisfaction, it might be a sign that you should seek professional advice or partners in the markets you wish to enter. “Marketers often need local knowledge on the ground to understand what challenges they’ll face in making their show a success,” says Richard Whinfrey of the Maverick Consultancy.

Some products will never have an appeal outside of their home market and some simply can’t be sold in major foreign markets due to legal restrictions, so it’s essential to know where your product stands before investing much time and effort. More often than not, once you examine the answers to the above questions in detail, they’ll influence your strategic or tactical approach for the better.

3 Choose Great Partners
Not every consultant, distributor or retail partner will share your commitment and goals, so it’s up to you to make sure that you’ve put the right team in place for every stage of your operations.

When choosing partners, be upfront and clear about what your goals are for the market and how you think they can be achieved. Take the necessary time to listen to their feedback and incorporate it into your plans. Spend a little time checking their references–a few phone calls to people who have worked with them before will likely reveal a lot.

Once you’re satisfied with your chosen partners, make sure to outline everyone’s responsibilities. Ferret out any potential conflicts of interest–and address them. It’s a delicate dance and everyone has to know where to put their feet. And make sure to put it in writing!

Three Common Mistakes Marketers Make When Venturing Overseas

Launching your DRTV campaign in a familiar market is hard enough - doing it overseas is especially challenging. Make sure that before you invest the time, money and effort to launch internationally, you’re aware of the most common pitfalls that await marketers in new international markets.

Lack of a clear strategy – You need decisive and clear strategies in place–whether you go alone or with a distributor–before you air your first test. Knowing what the next steps are in case your test isn’t a smash hit is essential to keeping your team focused and momentum on your side, especially when working with local distributors who will often look to you, the product owner, for guidance. Make sure you have well-communicated contingency plans ready to deploy once results start to come in.

Wavering commitment - So many great products and brands never get a chance overseas because their owners are quick to write off less-than-stellar results as a “foreign market thing.” If you don’t stand behind the effort 100 percent, you can’t expect your team or distributors to, either. Visit and study the markets you’re interested in and prepare to make at least some investment in getting your product(s) off the ground. Leaving the whole job up to a distributor won’t cut it.

Assuming marketing channels behave the same way as they do in North America – DRTV, the web, retail and live shopping are interdependent channels, but can behave very differently in concert overseas than at home. Your winning formula in North America might break down in Japan or Germany, where product lifecycles are extremely short and where knock-off peddlers are more nimble. Seek out advice from those who’ve faced these challenges before and make sure your intellectual property and patents are as strong as they can be.

4 Allow the Selling Points to Shine–in a Local Context
If you’ve done your due diligence in addressing the issues outlined above, this should be pretty straightforward.

By far, the best way to make your product shine internationally is to plan and shoot alternative takes and segments specifically for your target overseas markets. Planned in advance, this extra footage can be very effective in driving response–and at a very small marginal cost.

If, like many marketers, you must use existing footage for international creative, engage local, experienced editors and production staff, preferably with the oversight of a seasoned distributor or DRTV consultant.

5 Make Media Relevant and Measurable
Media is one of the hardest aspects of an international campaign to understand as an outsider, so it really pays to have an experienced agency planning and buying for you. Also, study the media landscape–especially what competitors are doing–and gain perspective from media buyers and advertising clients.

Your test airings have to do only one thing: give you a good read that enables you to make an informed next step. With that in mind, I recommend you work with your agency to design a test that:

Uses relevant media – Can you roll out to a significant degree if results are promising or are you just identifying a niche?

Contains contrasts – Each station you choose to air on should tell you more than just its response against advertising spend–it should help paint a clearer overall picture. Try mixing TV platforms, regional geography, lead-in and lead-out airings, caliber of channel and viewing demographic. In the hands of an experienced media buyer, all of these data points add up to sharper, more effective buying decisions.

Is congruent with your goals – Airing strictly for high ROI is admirable, but it might not be the best way to help provide “air cover” for retail or other sales channels. Make sure that your media agency is booking airtime that will help with the wider goals of your marketing campaign and not just identifying a few tried-and-true hot spots where almost anything sells well–you need an honest read on your product’s potential.

Don’t expect your North American media experience to translate seamlessly overseas. Sure, DRTV fundamentals share many of the same characteristics and principles no matter where the show or spot airs, but just because it works on CNBC in the U.S. doesn’t mean it’ll work on the European feed of CNBC.

6 Secure a Reliable Telemarketing, Fulfillment and logistics House
American-style call centers are rare in some parts of the world, and choosing the right company who understands how to sell your products over the phone can be challenging. Your experience at home will be extremely valuable to your overseas call center, so it’s a good idea to visit your vendors and invest in training and monitoring. Regular site visits and monitoring and training sessions are essential, so account for these costs when calculating your overall investment.

Once, while trying to start up a DRTV campaign in The Netherlands, the call center I chose for our inbound telemarketing sent our calls to their customer service department rather than the sales floor, destroying our ability to convert calls to orders. Weeks later, I learned that their head of new business–fearing they would alienate their other DRTV clients–had requested the move. Needless to say, we had chosen a poor partner and moved our inbound elsewhere.

Luckily, fulfillment is often more straightforward, and many excellent vendors with stellar reputations exist all over the world. Some U.S. fulfillment companies have partnerships with overseas counterparts and can help transition new business more smoothly than you might be able to do on your own, so checking with your existing fulfillment company is a good place to start.

7 Be Prepared to Collaborate
The best DRTV professionals consider their international markets to be as much a part of what they do as their domestic markets. Gone are the days when a marketer could send a master tape to a distributor and expect orders to magically pile up overnight.

Just as competition, media costs and a changing consumer landscape have made business more difficult domestically, the same challenges persist overseas, which is why your leadership as the original marketer is vital. Working closely with your overseas partners and sharing your knowledge will pay great dividends over time and open up new possibilities.

Peter Sengenberger is the founder and CEO of London-based Element Media Direct, a DR media planning and buying agency. He can be reached via e-mail at peter@elementmediadirect.com.