For everyone who wrestles with marketing translation (sorry, localization), you may appreciate this story (and short video) from NPR.
Turns out, many Americans living in China miss really good Chinese food…well, Chinese food as they remember it in America, anyway. So, a couple of enterprising Chinese Americans opened Fortune Cookie in Shanghai – a restaurant serving up the Americanized form of Chinese food to US expats and curious Chinese.
Aside from the humorous aspects of this story (the Chinese staff had only seen the white take-out boxes in Hollywood movies, so took pictures when they first saw them in real life), it does hold a lesson for medical device marketers, and the lesson is this: sometimes a US-centric message, if it’s the right one, can be adapted and succeed quite nicely in the local market. Not everything has to be created whole-cloth, in-country.
