Founder of Global Reach, Bill Dunlap specialized in international online marketing and e-commerce among mainly American companies. Global Reach is a methodology for companies to expand their Internet presence into a more international framework. This includes translating a website into other languages and actively promoting it, to increase local website traffic from countries by a promotional campaign.
Bill Dunlap, an MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) graduate, has made a life of bringing high-tech products and services to the international markets. When the microcomputer industry was in its early stages in the early 1980s, he set up a company to export popular Apple and PC software to top European markets. This led to a thorough familiarity with the European PC distribution business, and he worked then as AST Research's first European sales manager. Further opportunity brought him into Compaq Computer's newly established Paris office, where he became Compaq's first sales manager in France. He continued with Compaq afterwards at their European headquarters in Munich and managed Scandinavian sales.
Since the mid-1980s, Bill Dunlap has developed the international marketing consultancy Euro-Marketing Associates from Paris and San Francisco. In 1995, Euro-Marketing Associates was restructured into a virtual consultancy called Global Reach, a group of top online marketers throughout the world. The goal is to promote clients' websites in each targeted country, thus attracting more online traffic: more traffic, more sales.
*Interview of December 11, 1998
= How did using the Internet change your professional life?
Since 1981, when my professional life started, I've been involved with bringing American companies to Europe. This is very much an issue of language, since the products and their marketing have to be in the languages of Europe in order for them to be visible here. Since the Web became popular in 1995 or so, I've turned these activities to their online dimension, and have come to champion European e-commerce among my fellow American compatriates. Most lately at Internet World in New York, I spoke about European e-commerce and how to use a Website to address the various markets in Europe.
= What is the purpose of the Global Reach program?
Promoting your Web site is at least as important as creating it, if not more important. You should be prepared to spend at least as much time and money in promoting your Web site as you did in creating it in the first place. With the Global Reach program, you can have it promoted in countries where English is not spoken, and achieve a wider audience… and more sales. There are many good reasons for taking the online international market seriously. Global Reach is a means for you to extend your Web site to many countries, speak to online visitors in their own language and reach online markets there.
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
There are so few people in the U.S. interested in communicating in many languages — most Americans are still under the delusion that the rest of the world speaks English. However, here in Europe (I'm writing from France), the countries are small enough so that an international perspective has been necessary for centuries.