EMBRACE GILT
A Framework for Optimizing Your Business in Japan
Let’s focus on an optimization strategy that is core to firms in Japan that have foreign owners, foreign employees, or foreign clients. Specifically, how does your firm deal with GILT? That’s not a misspelling; I’m sure you are not up to anything nefarious. GILT is an acronym for Globalization, Internationalization, Localization, and Translation. These are related but distinct concepts.
Globalization is how your firm connects its customers, suppliers, vendors. Does your product or service work in other markets? Are you leveraging your access to global suppliers or local customers effectively? Most CEOs will know the answers to these questions intuitively but there is always value in iteratively reviewing where your firm is heading here. Do your firm’s products, services, offerings, workflows, culture, and systems integrate well into a globally connected economy?
Internationalization is mostly technical. Are your systems and processes functionally able to target market segments and deliver content across languages? Is your website using UTF8 encoding or are you stuck with an 8-bit or Shift-JIS system made locally? Does your website utilize geo-targeting and/or allow the user to efficiently switch languages and regions? Is your domain name a .com or a .jp? Do you use both? How and under what conditions? Can content and layout be modified easily to target specific users? Does your database schema support fields that typically don’t exist in non-Japanese systems, like the kana reading of vendor names or clients? Can you store and surface differently formatted dates and currencies and addresses and systems of measurement properly? Internationalization typically involves software development but is a collaborative process between an engineering team and your business team.
Localization at its core is about adapting your firm’s offerings to a specific market. While this includes translation, it is just as important to do market analysis and determine how your firm’s offering or marketing will be received in the target market. McDonalds in India does not have beef or pork on the menu. Amazon Prime offers different movies in different regions. Real estate websites in large cities in Japan have distance from train stations, a feature not common in other parts of the world. Ski resort websites have the distance from the lift. Things like that. At the end of the day, does your product or service connect with your target customers in a way that helps you convert them into paying clients?
Translation might seem obvious, but using this GILT framework we will limit the scope to one-to-one translation of text meaning that is a component of localization but does not define it. Not all content needs to be translated for all audiences, and some content differs between languages and markets.
Let’s look at a few examples of business situations that can be optimized using this framework.
FOREIGN CLIENTS AND JAPANESE EMPLOYEES
Let’s say you are in the property management business on behalf of property owners who live overseas and have invested in Japanese property. Perhaps you manage condominiums and houses in a Japanese ski resort that are foreign owned but only utilized by the owner a few weeks a year and otherwise rented out as accommodation so that the owner can realize a return on their investment. In an extreme example, all of your clients are foreign, and all of your employees are Japanese.
What does the owner need to be able to effectively delegate the management of their property to your firm? In their native language, say English or Chinese, using your website or app, they need to be able to remotely monitor their property, their trust account, and seamlessly interact with your reservation and operations staff. They may require occupancy reports, they may need to submit service requests (shovel the driveway! the boiler is due for repairs!), they may need to transfer money from their trust account to an overseas account, they will need to be able to book their own property from time to time. Do your systems facilitate and optimize this interaction, or do they slow it down?
What do the Japanese employees need, as the nexus between the property owners and their properties, to be able to effectively manage all of this at scale? Ways to input data with fields clearly labeled In Japanese, multilingual email and communication templates that align with your firm’s workflows and are already translated, the ability to quickly and easily respond to client reservations and service requests in the client’s native language. How do these employees manage the accommodation aspect? Perhaps their accommodation system needs to integrate with accommodation websites in Japan, Australia, and Hong Kong, all using different APIs. What about guest services? Is it easy to help the owner or accommodation guest to purchase transportation from the airport, lift tickets, or get a reservation at a local restaurant? When the staff manages accounting do they need to manually enter in the property’s electrical and internet bill data individually into a format readable by non-Japanese or can they just upload a CSV file from the Japanese bank and call it a day?
FOREIGN BUSINESS OWNER OPERATING IN JAPAN
Most of the people I’m talking to day-in day-out are savvy business people who have been in Japan a long time, but that doesn’t always translate to native-level language skills. I’ve been in Japan 20 years and it still takes me 2-3 times as long to write a Japanese email as an English one. Let’s say you are in the business of building solar and wind power plants in Japan. The FIT rate has made it a good business to be in this last decade. There are a number of regulatory agencies that you will need to interact with you will find yourself submitting the same applications over and over again. How easy are those to generate? How seamless will your communications with your suppliers, electricians, land clearing staff, and civil engineering team be? Are you putting your inkan to contracts you can’t read? If you are working on multiple sites you will see patterns emerge and these patterns are often opportunities to optimize and automate. A simple bilingual web application goes a long way; Japanese vendors and staff can input in their language, and you and your investors can review project progress and reports in yours.
TARGETING DIFFERENT MARKET SEGMENTS
I’ve spent a lot of time in Niseko, so let’s revisit the ski resort scenario. In the last decade or two Niseko has become an internationally renowned ski and snowboarding destination, thanks to its consistent and quality snow, the charm of the resort, and its accessibility from Chitose airport which is a destination for flights from Australia and Asia. This has lead to a boom in luxury accommodation that draws tens of thousands of keen powder hounds and families on vacation each winter. Of course, the number of inbound tourists to Niseko drops precipitously in summer, but that’s OK because Niseko offers a lot during the summer months as well: amazing food, golf, mountain biking, hiking, rafting, tree trekking, onsen, the list is long. In addition to the available activities, the guests are seasonal. Many guests in the summer are Japanese people visiting from nearby Sapporo or escaping Tokyo’s humidity, and content targeting them might clash with content targeting winter guests that needs to be maintained all year long. Will your site support content that is not one-to-one translations? Can you easily build a section on your site that targets and highlights Japanese-language summer bookings and drive Japanese people to it in spring and summer? Are your systems sufficiently agile to manage the differences in Japanese bookings and non-Japanese bookings? Is the billing system the same? The booking confirmation? The terms? The guest services?
You can make drastic improvements to your business prospects by iteratively optimizing your business using this GILT framework. Our speciality is on the technical internationalization aspect and we spend a lot of time facilitating localization by building bilingual and multilingual websites and applications and from what we’ve seen, done properly, it will lead to higher sales, satisfied customers, better employee morale, more efficient use of resources, and improve your bottom line. Best of luck! Shoot us an email at sales@perihelion.co.jp if you have any questions or feedback.
Perihelion KK