Back in my early years at HubSpot, all of the "models" on our website were actually our employees. This came from our scrappy start-up roots, but our customers really loved it. It was always fun to be on a customer call when someone recognized a HubSpotter from the website and said, "Wait, don't I know you?" This happened all the time, even though we were a public company and already had 10,000 customers by then. Our blog and our website got a lot of traffic, after all. So, it was not a small thing to make our employees "HubSpot-famous." We had quite a large community of customers, users, and blog audience. So how do you localize such a thing? When we were preparing to launch our office in Tokyo and localizing our website as part of the process, we realized those images of Americans were not going to cut it. We had a launch deadline to hit. What could we do? We quickly scoured stock photo sites for Asian-American models. They didn't look or feel as authentic as the ones of our employees did, but we needed to get the site live quickly. We could always replace them later, we figured. But, when we did a preview of the new website with our first couple of brand new Japanese employees, they delivered bad news: "These stock images you've chosen? The models are not Japanese." Face palm. Ugh. Embarrassing. We Americans didn't know what we didn't know. Japanese people could easily tell the models were not from Japan. We felt so ignorant! But hey, this is how you learn. Back to the drawing board! At lightning speed, we quickly organized a photo shoot with a local freelance photographer in Tokyo, got photos of our brand new HubSpot employees there, who fortunately were more than happy to help, and quickly replaced all the stock photo images with ones of real TokSpotters. Just like we had, in our home market, in the early days. And you know what? Our Japanese customers began to recognize those models from our Tokyo office, leading to a much more authentic, on-brand, and personalized experience for them as well. #cmo #marketing #localization #international 🌏 PS: Join people all around the world and subscribe to my FREE weekly newsletter, MAKING GLOBAL WORK. You'll get the best tips and advice for driving global growth and succeeding in your international career. 👉 Click my profile and hit Subscribe!
I had a similar experience in infant nutrition - markets like Kazakhstan very much wanted to see local babies whereas eg Vietnam mostly preferred blond haired, blue eyed German babies... It depends very much where your industry is in it's evolution phase and which geography you're based in
I remember that and shared that exact same Jira with my team a few months ago as we were scaffolding our localized site's experience 😀
I remember this like it was yesterday! To this day I'm so glad our Japanese teammates pushed us to get it right from day one. It made the site so much better and was a great reminder that every market has different expectations to adapt to
Nataly Kelly True authenticity is a power that's unmatched. Excellent story and guidance! 🔥
Great story, thanks for sharing! 🚀
Love this story! We've all been there and thankfully these cases give us both a story to tell and expertise to share with companies new to international expansion to help them avoid these situations! I also remember when we used employees in marketing videos in the early Avigilon days. As a company in the video security biz, we had to ensure we looked as sketchy as possible to be able to pass for "persons of interest" 😂