Customer Experience and the UK Market

By Marty Carroll

An Australian behavioural economist has just published research that purports to show that more British people than Americans died on the titanic because they were more likely to queue for the lifeboats. He claims to have isolated all other variables and narrowed in on this conclusion – American passengers were 8.5% more likely to survive compared to other nationalities but that the British were 7% less likely to survive. He argues that long established social norms worked against the British and in favour of the Americans. While the British were more gentlemanly the Americans were more self interested.

In spite of the ‘special relationship’ and a common language there are significant cultural differences between the American and British populations today. Take, for example, Barack Obama’s inauguration speech. While the new US President is, indisputably, a skilled orator many of us on this side of the Atlantic were cringing at his cliché ridden speech while TV pictures seemed to suggest that at least half of the US population were in tears with the emotion of it all. Fine speech it may have been, but it’s difficult to imagine a British politician getting away with such excesses of rhetoric any time soon. My own country folk were even betting on the number of clichés in the speech.

But do these cultural differences matter in the context of customer experiences? My contention is that they do and significantly so. The things that matter to an American don’t necessarily matter to someone on this side of the Atlantic and vice versa. For this reason the types of experience rolled out to the US population cannot be simply transplanted to a UK market. We all know the feeling of being served by an employee of an American business – too much smiling that’s not really smiling and a lot of buddy stuff. It works over there but not here. We’re much more reserved and cynical as a whole so perceive this to be insincere. Perhaps we should lighten up a bit but it will take a little while to change such a deep rooted mindset.

Websites also need to be tailored to the particular nuances of the UK. Here are some notable differences to illustrate:

• Completely different imagery needs to be used for UK sites. We recently worked with an international travel brand and they now have two very different image banks for both markets.
• British people are more likely to click on the ‘send to a friend’ link now popular on the web than their North American counterparts.
• Different colour combinations must be used – even within a brand colour palette. For reasons we do not yet fully understand, colours that attract one demographic can sometimes repel another.

The customer experience needs to be designed with the audience needs in mind at all times and this is no less so for internationalisation (or should that be internationalization?).