I have watched companies struggle with localization for decades, especially on the web. Too often, localization is treated as a cost of compliance rather than an investment in reducing customer friction.
The current debate over Quebec’s Bill 96 and its French-language requirements is a perfect example of this debate. As part of the U.S.-Canada trade discussions, American manufacturers have raised concerns about requirements for French-language product information, labeling and documentation. Those requirements create costs. Translation costs money. Packaging changes cost money. Maintaining localized manuals and marketing materials adds operational complexity.
I understand why companies care about those costs, but what interests me is the business logic behind the objection.
There is a legitimate legal question about whether a regulation can create an unnecessary barrier to trade even when it applies equally to domestic and foreign companies. That is for trade lawyers and the WTO to sort out.
But Quebec isn’t saying American companies must provide French while Canadian companies get a pass. The requirement follows the market, not the manufacturer’s nationality. If you want to sell a covered product in Quebec, you must comply with Quebec’s requirements, whether your company is based in Montreal, Michigan, Munich, or Tokyo.
That doesn’t mean the requirements are beyond challenge. A regulation can still be overly burdensome, and companies should absolutely question requirements when the cost is disproportionate to the benefit.
But consider what we expect when companies enter our market.
The United States has its own labeling and marking requirements for imported products, including requirements that certain country-of-origin information be provided in English. We apparently accept the underlying principle that information presented to American consumers should be understandable to American consumers.
So why is it unreasonable for Quebec to apply a similar principle to its consumers?
We can debate whether Quebec has drawn the line in exactly the right place. We can debate the implementation, the costs, and whether every element of Bill 96 is necessary. But “this costs American companies money” isn’t, by itself, a particularly compelling argument to customers.
Of course it costs money. Adapting products to markets costs money, and that is where I think we often get localization wrong.
Isn’t Helping Customers Make Decisions the Point?
Canada’s Competition Bureau describes the purpose of labeling requirements as helping buyers make informed purchasing decisions. Quebec’s Charter of the French Language similarly establishes consumers’ right to be informed and served in French. Isn’t that what we want?
Companies spend enormous amounts of money trying to make it easier for customers to make purchasing decisions. We optimize websites, improve product descriptions, build comparison tools, personalize experiences, and obsess over reducing friction throughout the customer journey.
Then we get to localization, and suddenly making the product easier for the customer to understand becomes an expense we’d rather eliminate. Before deciding that French labels and manuals represent an unnecessary burden, did anyone ask French-speaking consumers in Quebec whether they consider them unnecessary?
Maybe they do. Maybe they don’t. But shouldn’t the people we’re asking to buy our products have some role in determining whether the information we provide them has value? This isn’t a new attitude.
The Inconvenience Was His
Years ago, I attended a search conference in Toronto where an American speaker commented from the stage that it was stupid to force companies to maintain both English and French versions of their Canadian websites. From his perspective, it was unnecessary duplication and an inconvenience for companies operating in Canada.
The Canadian audience eviscerated him.
He later tried to walk back the comment, explaining that he wasn’t familiar with the legal requirements or with how many Canadians spoke French. But what stuck with me wasn’t his ignorance of Canadian language policy. It was the perspective from which he had evaluated localization.
Maintaining another language was inconvenient to him. He argued that the additional content had to be created. Someone had to manage it. Someone had to pay for it. From the company’s perspective, those costs were obvious. The value to the French-speaking customer apparently wasn’t.
That is a pattern I have encountered repeatedly throughout my career working with international websites. We are very good at calculating localization costs. We are much less effective at calculating the friction created when we don’t do it.
We Already Adapt Products to Markets
Language isn’t even the best example of this. Measurements may make the contradiction more obvious. The United States is one of the few countries where consumers still routinely encounter pounds, ounces, feet, inches and Fahrenheit. If an American company wants to sell globally, adapting measurements and specifications to local conventions is simply part of doing business.
We don’t seriously expect a customer in France, Japan, or Germany to pull out a calculator because we decided converting inches to centimeters was an unnecessary localization expense. We don’t tell someone buying clothing or shoes in another market to figure out American sizing because maintaining another size chart costs us money.
Companies routinely adapt currencies, measurements, dimensions, electrical specifications, date formats, terminology, and other product information to ensure customers understand what they are buying. All of those adaptations have a cost and are the cost of doing business in another market.
Imagine applying the same argument being made about French-language information in Quebec to measurements:
“Most Canadians can probably figure out what 10 pounds or 12 inches means, so requiring American manufacturers to provide metric measurements creates an unnecessary burden on U.S. businesses.” Even if they can figure it out, why should they have to?
We are the company asking for their business. The question shouldn’t be whether the customer can adapt to us. The question should be why we would intentionally make them do so.
It Can’t Work Both Ways
I saw the reverse of this attitude when I lived in Japan. Showing newly arrived Americans around, I was always fascinated by how many complained about the lack of English on locally made products. Walking into a store in Japan and asking, “Why isn’t this in English?” Think about the expectation behind that question.
These were products made in Japan, marketed to Japanese consumers and sold in Japanese supermarkets. Why should they be in English?
We were the foreigners. We were the ones who had entered their market. The inconvenience was ours. Yet it seemed perfectly reasonable to some Americans that Japanese manufacturers should accommodate us by providing English.
Now flip the situation.
An American company wants to sell its products in Quebec, but providing information in French is viewed as an unnecessary burden. We want access to those customers, but adapting the product and marketing materials to them is apparently asking too much.
It can’t work both ways.
When we’re the customer in someone else’s country, localization feels like something companies should provide for us. When we’re the company entering someone else’s market, localization suddenly becomes an expensive burden we shouldn’t have to bear.
Sometimes Localization Prevents a Return
I recently experienced the commercial consequence of this with something as mundane as a tiny vacuum cleaner. I am admittedly a bit of a coffee nerd. Some beans create a fair amount of dust and small particles when ground, which inevitably end up around my coffee station and sometimes in the grinder gears. I decided a small handheld vacuum would be an easy solution.
I found one on Amazon that looked perfect for the job and ordered it. When it arrived, the instructions contained a few lines in English, but almost everything else was in Chinese. There weren’t even useful illustrations showing how the product went together or explaining where two of the attachments were supposed to be used.
Could I have figured it out? Probably. I could have searched online, used Google Translate, pointed my phone at the instructions, or simply experimented until I worked out what everything did. Yes, it was a vacuum; I don’t need an advanced degree to figure it out: attach the attachment and press the on button. But it turned out there was also a blower option, and the brush adapter I thought was for the vacuum was actually for the blower, which I realized when it blew the crumbs everywhere.
But why was that my job?
The manufacturer had chosen to sell the product on Amazon in the United States. I hadn’t wandered into a store in China and become irritated because a locally produced product didn’t have English instructions. They had entered my market and asked me to buy their product. And I nearly returned it.
In fact, I had already found a more expensive alternative that appeared easier to use, and several reviews specifically mentioned that it came with an English manual. I was prepared to pay more for essentially the same functionality simply because the other company had made it easier for me to understand and use what I was buying.
That is the localization cost that rarely makes it onto a spreadsheet.
The first manufacturer saved whatever it cost to create a proper English manual, illustrations, and localized product documentation. From their perspective, perhaps that looked like efficiency. From my perspective, they nearly lost the sale and incurred the cost of an Amazon return.
Their competitor was potentially going to get more of my money not because it necessarily had a better vacuum, but because it had reduced the friction between purchasing the product and successfully using it.
The Cost We Don’t Measure
This is bigger than Bill 96, French labels, metric measurements, or tiny vacuum cleaners. It reflects a fundamental problem with how companies calculate the economics of localization.
Localization appears on the corporate spreadsheet as a cost. The friction caused by not localizing rarely appears.
Translation has a line item. Local content has a line item. Maintaining another language version has a line item. Different product specifications, terminology, currencies, measurements, payment options, and support documentation all have line items.
The customer who struggles to understand the product doesn’t.
Neither does the uncertainty created by unfamiliar terminology, the additional effort required to convert a measurement, or the customer who abandons the purchase because a competitor made the decision easier. Those costs don’t arrive as invoices explaining why the customer went somewhere else.
So companies optimize what they can see. They reduce the localization costs they can measure while passing those costs on to customers as friction they don’t measure.
That is especially shortsighted now that AI and automation are dramatically reducing many of the traditional costs associated with producing and maintaining localized information. Quality control, cultural adaptation and regulatory accuracy still require expertise, but if there were ever a time to rethink the economics of localization, this is it.
Entering another market means adapting more than your shipping destination. Products, packaging, instructions, websites, marketing materials, measurements, terminology, payment methods, and sometimes even the product itself need to reflect the market you’re asking to buy from you.
That’s not some strange penalty imposed on international business. That’s international business.
Challenge a regulation if it is excessive. Debate whether Quebec has drawn the line in the right place. Ask whether the costs imposed by a particular requirement are proportional to the benefit. But don’t confuse the cost of adapting to a market with evidence that adapting to that market has no value.
Instead of asking only, “How much does localization cost us?” perhaps companies should also be asking, “How much customer friction does localization remove?”
The American speaker in Toronto saw two language versions of a website and saw duplication. The French-speaking customer saw a company willing to communicate with them in their language.
The Americans I encountered in Japan saw a package they couldn’t understand and wondered why the manufacturer hadn’t made it easier for them. The Japanese manufacturer saw a product designed for the customers it actually served.
And I saw a small vacuum cleaner with instructions I couldn’t understand and nearly replaced it with a more expensive one that I could.
These are different versions of the same fundamental question:
Who should adapt to whom?
If we want to enter another market and sell to its consumers, the answer should be pretty simple.
We should adapt to them.
Localization is the process of adapting our product and information to the customer, not testing how much adaptation we can force the customer to do for us.
And if eliminating localization saves our company money only by making the customer work harder, we haven’t eliminated the cost.
We’ve simply transferred it to the customer.
