HP

Cyber in Spanish, French, German, Italian and English

Brexit or no Brexit, we are all Europeans in marketing. Global corporations need to organise their communications – and content – across the continent.

It might be tempting to simply run all content in English. Certainly if you’re in the B2B sphere, that isn’t such a bad call. Most C-suiters speak and read English to a high standard, especially in the technology sector.

But that isn’t the point: the ‘one language fits all’ approach isn’t good enough. It goes against the whole global-local ethos, where a big corporation hopes to take advantage of its scale but at the same time show sensitivity to local markets and cultures.

HP asked us to produce a cyber-security project for business in French, German, Italian, Spanish and English. What’s more they wanted contributing writers with influence in their countries. The idea was to create a pan-European technology forum for HP's Business Now site.

Among the commentators we chose was Enrique Dans, professor of Innovation at IE business school in Madrid and a prolific blogger with 250,000 Twitter followers. He wrote about the use of artificial intelligence to test security systems.

Javier Martin Robles, founder of Loogic, an education site for start-ups in Spain, wrote about why Black Friday could be one of the biggest risks to an online business, with multiple transactions increasing the risk of cybercrime.

Federico Barbieri, a consultant in luxury good marketing in Italy, explained that cybersecurity is a business issue not a technology issue, especially in ecommerce, where customer and company are constantly connected.