Change Data Value - Special Characters

[Eitan_Rapps1]

We have implemented LinkedIn Lead Gen forms, which is working just fine, except for one issue. Since the LinkedIn form is auto-filled, any leads whose LinkedIn profiles are not in English automatically have their countries entered into our database in their local language. We built a Smart Campaign to change the country to the correct one from our standardized list, but Marketo does not seem to be able to recognize special characters that seem to spell the same word.

For example, our Smart Campaign is supposed to change México to Mexico, but it does not.

Is there a better way to do this, or does Marketo consider é to be the same as e, and we need to make the manual update each time?

[Bryan_Epstein]

Hi Eitan, I just created a Smart Campaign on my end updating épstein to Epstein and it worked for me. Would you be able to take a screenshot of your Smart List and Flow Step used for updating the value?

[Bram_Valdez1]

Under Admin, you should check the "Country" field to make sure it has permission to overwrite.

[SanfordWhiteman]

....Marketo does not seem to be able to recognize special characters that seem to spell the same word.

FYI, this is known professionally as the ​strength ​of a Unicode ​collator.

When a collator is set to PRIMARY strength (meaning Primary Character Differences ​Only), ​it will consider "é" and "e" to be the same for the purposes of collation, i.e. sorting.

I try not to talk about it in terms of semantics like "spell the same word" or "the same letter" because there are infinite culturally-specific exceptions and there's a risk of offending people (not the case here, just pointing that out). Instead, I keep it technical, like "If someone had a low-ASCII-only keyboard they may have been unable to use high-ASCII 'é' in this certain word so we want to change it."

Anyway... Marketo definitely has quirks when it comes to collation, but the Smart List you're describing should be able to isolate "México" from "Mexico". Note an ad hoc lead search in the Database section uses different, I would argue broken, rules from a Smart List.