Palgrave Macmillan: Confusing national and global
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Use of a home-country site as the default global site does potential customers a disservice.
The Site
Palgrave Macmillan, a UK-based academic publisher, does many potential customers a disservice by using its UK & Europe site as its international site by default.
Palgrave Macmillan’s dotcom launch page is a simple portal offering five regional options and a sixth for Journals. Three of the choices link directly to the home page of country/regional websites for UK & Europe, USA & Canada and Australia respectively. Both the remaining regional options, Asia & Latin America and Africa & Middle East, go to the UK & Europe home page, where there are no obvious links for anyone from either region to follow.
Neither of the regional designations corresponds with options in the UK & Europe contacts pages, including International Sales (it groups Middle East, South Asia and East Asia, for example).
The Takeaway
Palgrave Macmillan displays a certain amount of global marketing conceit in using its portal page to show off local options that it plainly doesn’t have. But it’s unlikely that the publisher is being deliberately deceitful rather than simply inept. Expectation and journey management are both obviously handled badly but are compounded by Palgrave Macmillan not thinking through the consequences for international visitors of its home country site also being its de facto global site.
This is an issue more usually associated with US-based companies, for whom their dotcom address is also their home-country address. Palgrave’s portal to regional content is a partial solution but still pitches a lot of potential international visitors into Europe-focused content. Having given them the expectation of localised material, it should at least provide clear signposting on the home page to what region-specific information there is or a direct link to customised contact details. That would ideally involve harmonising information organisation with, for example, the sales structure and perhaps substituting the two dead-end regional options on the portal page with a single ‘International sales’ or ‘Other regions’ option.
http://www.palgrave.com/First published on 22 April, 2008