Understanding buyer personas

Recently, David Meerman Scott, an American online marketing strategist, and author of several books on marketing, criticized poorly planned website that Tokyo Olympics 2020 committee developed for the Olympics 2020 bids.

http://www.webinknow.com/2013/04/worlds-worst-website.html

He mentioned few flaws, which I also agreed.
The first problem, he claims, is direct translation of the contents to another language.

The vision of the Tokyo Olympics 2020 is the following:

"Tokyo 2020 will bring together dynamic innovation and global inspiration. It will unite the power of the Games with the unique values of the Japanese people and the excitement of a city that sets global trends. It will be a unique celebration that will help reinforce and renew the Olympic Values for the new generation. And will contribute to more young people, worldwide, sharing the dreams, hopes and benefits of sport."

The paragraph really doesn't convey clear message except it has a lots of buzz words that nowadays does not actually have much value by itself (there are many reasons I can think of why this is happening, but it is off the main theme of this blog post, so I will refrain from writing it).

The second problem, which I believe is more crucial than the first one is not understanding the target audiences. The Tokyo 2020 committee has to promote the city to the entire world but they do not understand what the audiences are interested in. This is actually very typical of many Japanese firms who attempt to go global, as the author of the article said. First, the Japanese firms do not understand what is going outside their island. Second, they believe applying the same approach, which was successful in Japan, will ensure the success in the other region of the world. Third, because of the first and the second reasons, feedback that the Japanese firms receive from local markets are simply nonsense, if the feedback and the firms mentality conflicts.


The website of the competing cities, Madrid and Istanbul, seems it is more carefully planed and delivered more effective contents that are translated to wider range of the audiences.

The lesson learned here is not to denounce Japanese but to understand how the contents should be well studied, planned, and presented in any website especially the owner of the website is reaching the market that they are unfamiliar. Without an effective website, no matter how much you optimize the search or invest money to generate traffic, you won't see any success in the website (unless your objective is purely to generate traffic).