Information Sharing Among Countries: A Perspective from Country-Specific Websites in Global Brands

TL;DR

This study examines how global brands manage content consistency across country-specific websites, revealing patterns of information sharing and proposing a simple approach to improve consistency.

Contribution

It provides a qualitative analysis of content sharing traits among countries' websites and introduces a pattern-based approach for consistent information dissemination.

Findings

Corporate and customer support info is shared globally and locally.

Product info is shared locally and regionally.

Higher content propagation correlates with higher website coupling.

Abstract

Multiple official languages within a country along with languages common with other countries demand content consistency in both shared and unshared languages during information sharing. However, inconsistency due to conflict in content shared and content updates not propagated in languages between countries poses a problem. Towards addressing inconsistency, this research qualitatively studied traits for information sharing among countries inside global brands as depicted by content shared in their country-specific websites. First, inconsistency in content shared is illustrated among websites highlighting the problem in information sharing among countries. Second, content propagation among countries that vary in scales and coupling for specific content categories are revealed. Scales suggested that corporate and customer support related information tend to be shared globally and locally respectively while product related information is both locally and regionally suitable for sharing. Higher occurrences of propagation when sharing corporate related information also showed tendency for high coupling between websites suggesting the suitability for rigid consistency policy compared to other categories. This study also proposed a simplistic approach with pattern of sharing to enable consistent information sharing.