[...]... local markets Personalization relates to the online practice of mass customization and the ideal of one -to- one marketing, both enabled by the Web’s ability to capture information about visitors and react with appropriately tailored content and data When applied to ethnic and international markets, this is globalization, the term that practitioners use to describe their ability to appeal to buyers around... for example, many Germans still do not use credit cards and will not do business unless they can use a bank debit As American travel sites look to the Japanese market, they will have to tweak their business models In Asia, for example, 85 percent of the fares are negotiated as “merchant fares” and are hard to find in the dominant customer reservation systems such as Sabre, Amadeus, and Galileo Similarly,... conversion rates among those travelers were considerably lower than the average of U.S travelers Travelocity’s planners found these underserved “foreign” visitors very attractive, as travelers in some European markets exhibit an enthusiasm about travel far beyond that of the average American tourist For example, Germans and Scandinavians travel more per capita than do Americans These Europeans have more days... I have set up www businesswithoutborders.info as a place to keep the content of this book as current as circumstances allow xx Business Without Borders Meet Mira, Our Globalization Heroine Each chapter begins and ends with an italicized passage describing the thought processes and actions of a woman named Mira Vozreniya, the chief marketing officer of a U.S.-based company Mira is a composite character... electricity has demonstrable benefits that most financial analysts and pundits have failed to quantify Just 10 years ago, getting two companies to transfer data between their disparate systems could take half a year and cost millions of dollars, and the notion of global supply chains was unthinkable Today, because of the widespread implementation of IP and its supporting infrastructure of Web standards by... Companies Worldwide Are Committing to Local Markets Your competitors have already started to benefit from their commitment to make interacting and transacting easier for their international business customers U.S companies expect to serve up to twice as many international Web sites by 2004 as they did in 2000,14 and many European firms already market directly to American and British buyers For example,... definition—globalization means good business, wherever you happen to want to sell Global Business Does Not Mean Every Country To paraphrase an old political truism, “All commerce is local.” Ideally, a Web site will look and feel like it was built in that market for only that market, whether it was a local company, a foreign business, or a British firm developing an online experience for South Asian inhabitants... art as much as a discipline, while computer-aided machine translation tends to be much more utilitarian with a focus on conveying merely the gist Localization describes a more ambitious task that tailors translated words and transactions to local needs For example, a German company selling into the States will mark prices in dollars, replace DHL with FedEx as the shipper, and translate privacy statements... providers and buyers of hardware and software, a company can plug its external Web site into its internal fulfillment systems Because of IP, a teenager in Germany can look at an easyto-use interface at landsend.com, click once, and have a pair of jeans show up in three days IP makes it possible for two companies that decide to partner for a project to snap their corresponding applications together quickly... supply chain • All the while, Eastman uses the Web to increase international awareness of its products and brands As a company strategist observed, “You can’t generate sales from potential customers who have never heard of Eastman Chemical or don’t understand what we have to offer You have to do business in the language of your markets.” Introduction xiii Winning Underserved Customers within National Borders . European markets exhibit an enthusiasm about travel far beyond that of the average American tourist. For example, Ger- mans and Scandinavians travel more per capita than do Americans. These Europeans. Louis Carvallo, Anne Ertlé, and Joel Pulliam, supplied background on issues ranging from localization to legal to vendor landscapes. Finally, I want to thank eMarketer for access to its eStats database,. go global, figuring in most cases that they were not ready to make the endur- ing organizational and budgetary commitments to new markets. Lacking a steadfast promise to an international agenda, their