Glocalisation - thinking globally and acting locally - is a well-known strategy for international brands expanding into new markets. It’s why MacDonalds offers a Teri Tama Burger in Japan and a McAllo Tikki in India, under the same golden arches. It’s making sure your product and messaging works in a new location by including what local customers want; while keeping true to the core values that make your brand instantly recognisable.
It’s an approach that you can apply to your digital signage network to improve engagement, whether you have 20 screen locations or 2,000. It’s about creating locally relevant content, that still looks and feels part of one central brand. Here we look at how you can use some of the unique features of Cenareo’s digital signage content management platform to put this into practice.
👀 What is Glocal digital signage?
The goal for digital signage - like all advertising mediums - is to get your message out. The audience for your message, whether it’s customers, colleagues or a mix of both, needs to be interested in what you’re saying. The most engaging content will always be local: at the most basic level, it’s in the right language, the right time zone and it’s culturally appropriate. With a better level of localisation, it’s useful and relevant, even entertaining.
If you’re using signage in a corporate environment for employee engagement for example, your team will want to know who has won salesperson of the year in their office, they may be less interested in who has won in Ghent. In a retail setting, it’s seeing a Chinese new year offer in Shanghai, but not in Paris. It is the difference between your signage being background noise that’s tuned out, or a home screen that they regularly check for updates.
But at the same time, the most professional content for a brand is also consistent in look and feel to everything the brand stands for. And that’s the challenge. At different times, you will want to put out messages to different audiences: one to all, global messages that everyone needs to hear; one to many, in most countries, one to few, in specific regions and one to one, to reach individuals. Your communication needs to be agile to adapt to your target audiences while keeping your brand’s tone of voice and values. That’s where digital signage comes into its own.
❔ Why digital signage is the perfect tool for glocal marketing
1- Physical localisation
Digital signage is hugely flexible and easy to localise. Once your screens are in place, with the right content management platform, you can easily choose what content goes out on each one. For example, with Cenareo’s platform, by segmenting displays by your choice of tag you can send campaigns to different screen groups according to the location or the position, for example, by region, by language, by job function. Want to speak to your accounts departments in EMEA, easy? Want to speak to your warehouse in Wales? Also easy.
2- Templates for content localisation
No matter the audience or the message, keep the look of your content consistent and on-brand. With our signage platform you can set up custom branded themes to make sure that, for example, your company colours, company font and logo, are fixed on any content that is developed for signage by any of your people. Once this is set up at a global/central level, content will automatically be branding consistent.
3- User rights management
One of the biggest challenges of digital signage at scale is the fluid management of the content that must be broadcast. You want to be able to have global oversight, but local creativity. The most engaging content is created by those closest to the audience, so you need local teams to contribute. However, people with content to distribute might not be marketing specialists. How do you balance the two goals? With Cenareo’s platform, it’s easy to set up Co-operative Management, with different access levels for different members of a team.
We make it easy to add content with a super simple workflow and a platform that accepts all common types of content (text, image, video files, social media integration etc.) into pre-approved content templates. With Co-operative Management, all content can be integrated into a global program overseen by head office for consistency, but also for reporting - so that the comms teams can check everything’s on track.
At Cenareo, with our cloud-based digital signage CMS offered as-a-service, we make it easy to customise and control your content - to both localise and globalise your comms. We help you achieve the best of both worlds, delivering engaging messages relevant to your local audience that is also on-brand and consistent with your other communications. Make your digital signage content both more interesting and more consistent by using a glocal model. No more displays as background noise - make them a branded space for elevating local voices instead.
