The death of Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej has led to stores running out of black and white clothing as the population mourns its leader in color-appropriate clothing. What does this mean for website localization? Consider the Thailand home pages for…
UPDATE: The 2017 Web Globalization Report Card is now available. I’m pleased to announce the publication of the 2016 Web Globalization Report Card and, with it, the top 25 websites: Google Facebook Wikipedia Hotels.com NIVEA Booking.com Nestlé Pampers Adobe…
For the 2015 Web Globalization Report Card, we studied 10 retail websites: Best Buy Costco GameStop Gap H&M IKEA McDonald’s Staples Starbucks Toys R Us UNIQLO Walmart Zara Out of those 10 websites, Starbucks emerged as number one. Here is a screen…
I enjoying watching how Western companies localize their websites and products to capitalize on Chinese New Year — the Year of the Sheep (or Goat). Like this gift card from Starbucks China: And this hero image on the Microsoft China home…
UPDATE: The 2017 Web Globalization Report Card is now available. More than ten years ago I set out to create a report that benchmarked global websites. I looked at languages supported. I studied the localized websites. I interviewed the executives…
Starbucks currently has 19,000 locations of which 11,000 are in the US. According to this Wall Street Journal Q&A (reg. required), Howard Schultz remains optimistic about Asia: Outside the U.S., Starbucks is now in 62 countries. “The biggest opportunity we have…
I begin this post with a question because I don’t have an answer. A book making news these days is The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler. It’s about Hollywood’s active self-censorship to appease German censors during Hitler’s reign. According to the…
Chief Executive Magazine recently featured a brief Q&A with Jim Donald, CEO of Starbucks. He shed some light on the company’s global strategy. in short, Starbucks is trying to change as little as possible in each new market they enter.…