Regional differences in online reading habits?

Question

I’m working on a corporate website for a global brand, and today I was thrown quite an interesting question that has stirred my curiosity…

The brand needs to create separate content pages for each region (US, Europe, Asia etc…). Their question was whether different territories preferred to consume content in different ways. For example, do US visitors read more text online than their European counterparts?

I was quite skeptical about this, recommending that we adopt tested and proven design / content patterns regardless of region…. However I was still curious to see if there was any substance to their assumption.

I’ve checked the data I have available to me (Which is all of an analytical nature; GA and Crazy Egg), and as far as I can see there aren't any clear patterns in the data - but it is limited.

I was wondering if anyone had explored this area, whether it's in the form of case studies or research?

Cheers! :-)

Answer 1

The answer depends much on brand marketing policy and organisational structure. Suppose your brand has reginal branches which are relatively independent. Their behavior may vary and thus requirements to contents and even design may vary. If your brand corporate website has centralized maintenance most probably it has no possibility to take into account all subtle differences. In other words you should take in mind that website should be maintained after its deployment and having very different parts of site requires much more resource to manage it.