Automotive companies are scaling into new markets, with ambitious digital strategies, connected platforms and localized marketing plans. But without being culturally aligned, brands risk diluting their identity, losing momentum – and ultimately risk failure.
That’s an expensive proposition in an industry making huge investments in disruptive and sweeping technological change. When spending on EVs alone is forecast to exceed $1.2 trillion by 2030, and even modernizing a single plant can entail multi-billion dollar outlay, global expansion is a strategic imperative that’s simply too expensive to get wrong.
The expansion challenge no-one talks about
It’s an exciting and dynamic time. Established automotive incumbents face unprecedented change, and the need to adapt rapidly to shifting technology, supply chains and customer expectations. The global market is being disrupted by fast, sharp new entrants, aiming to reach new markets and win customer hearts. Everyone sees the chance to thrive amid new opportunities.
In this environment, automotive brands are investing vast sums into expansion projects, positioning themselves to compete and innovate across the globe. Yet despite their investment, many are encountering friction.
Expanding automotive businesses face regional performance gaps. In some territories the brand seems to ‘land’, creating a consumer response that translates into sales. In others it’s wide of the mark, with messaging, marketing and even the product leaving consumers unmoved. User adoption is slower than forecast. Sales lag targets. Customer support demands are higher than expected, and individual issues can be harder to solve.
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This lack of resonance can dilute success in a territory, or it can even lead to outright failure. But while it may arise from many issues, it has a single root cause: cultural misalignment between global content, and local customer expectations. A brand that snaps effortlessly into the culture and expectations of, say, the US, can be all at sea in Asia.
More importantly, large geographical regions are just that – the Asian market is vast, with wide cultural differences between Sri Lanka and China, or from Turkey to Japan. Having global scale and momentum is not enough for sustainable success in every market: traction comes from relevance.
Misalignment is costing you time, trust, and revenue
Relevance isn’t a binary concern, of course. Even in their home territories, brands will resonate with only a portion of the market. Successful brands are those that resonate the most widely, or the most strongly with key demographics among buyers and influencers. When expanding into new territories, the goal is to translate for a new market this alignment between what the brand can offer, and the wants and needs of consumers.
Misalignment most typically comes when businesses attempt to duplicate with minimal changes their brand and its strategies across multiple very different populations. It’s a fundamental mistake, and it leads to problems with the absolute basics of brand experience.
In practice, misalignment arises from issues such as reused messaging. What plays brilliantly to the home market – or even to most of the world – can miss the mark culturally or emotionally with a new audience. Shared references, traditions and values are different between populations.
The things built on these foundations are different, too. The essentials of brand identity – such as wit, confidence, playfulness or coolness – can be difficult to replicate. But just as importantly, they might simply be inappropriate or unappealing to the audience, diluting the brand as a result.
Duplication has far more wide-reaching consequences. User expectations and behavior vary across the world, so rolling the same user-experience (UX) flows out to a new territory could be doomed to failure.
Globally, users may want to achieve certain interactions through different channels, or they may use the same channel to achieve different ends. Even something as simple as using consistent spacing, tables and line heights could result in CX friction and frustration when it comes up against a new character set.
There are many other potential pitfalls. Overly formal tone or naming conventions can feel awkward in some markets, just as overly informal ones can in others. Misaligned manuals, blogs and other support or onboarding content can end up confusing users, rather than converting them.
Example: When tone and terminology derail market entry
A Chinese EV manufacturer launches as a premium brand in the Southeast Asian market. However, its use of an overly formal tone, together with untranslated terminology, means that the brand doesn’t resonate as strongly as expected.
Crucially, an inconsistent onboarding UX leaves early adopters feeling unsupported, eroding trust and undermining the brand image.
The misalignment driving these issues causes real and persistent brand damage that can be hard to overcome. You only get one chance to make a first impression; launching with half-baked messaging and a terrible UX can leave bad feelings that may linger for years.
Early adopters and enthusiasts can be key to succeeding in a new territory as an automotive brand. Provide these essential customers with a poor experience, and you’ll lose momentum you may never regain.
The opportunity: relevance builds traction
This risk of cultural misalignment of course creates a great opportunity for the brands who successfully can and do address new audiences. These businesses understand that content and experiences need to be adapted, not just by language, but by cultural expectations.
When messaging, marketing, UX and all the other things that define the business are shaped with an understanding of the new audience, brands gain customer trust faster, and see better regional performance.
This accelerated performance is visible across the organization, and particularly in areas crucial to building sustainable success. Cultural relevance can increase:
- Qualified leads through inbound marketing campaigns
- Success and scale in account-based marketing
- Conversion rates in e-commerce or configurators
- Digital product adoption
- Post-sale engagement and retention
- Consistency in brand perception across markets
However desirable it is to achieve consistent cross-market performance, however, it’s key to understand that it doesn’t come through a replicated, one-size-fits-all approach.
Success requires building a global content strategy aligned with business goals. Consistency comes from communicating core brand values and delivering experiences that strike the same notes in each territory – though the messages and experiences themselves will be subtly different.
How to improve cultural traction
Senior leaders in automotive brands are empowered to inspire and lead the programmes that deliver success. They can build partnerships, and advocate for the new approaches and processes that help achieve cultural traction, and improve brand alignment in underperforming regions.
There are wins to be had through tactical changes in the organisation. Directors and VPs can drive programmes of change, such as:
- Build for scale– integrate market adaptation into product and campaign planning and development, rather than leaving it to post-launch afterthought
- Develop region-specific tone and UX guidelines – these reduce review cycles, errors and brand inconsistencies, reducing costs and improving performance
- Treat cultural nuance as part of CX excellence – champion it as an enabler of growth, rather than simply a ‘nice to have’
- Prioritize high-impact, high-visibility experiences – start with onboarding flows, support content and in-app copy
In addition to organizational changes, leaders have the opportunity to drive success by monitoring, benchmarking and acting on problems. Programmes to audit CX and conversion friction across priority regions can identify and target drop-offs in onboarding, usage, support or engagement. This enables swift action to realign campaigns and operations, supporting consistency and success.
Strategic enablement: the tools for success
Success in adapting to the culture and expectations in new markets comes through a combination of leadership, expertise, and localization excellence.
Senior leaders with vision and ownership of new markets recognize their challenges and opportunities. They can drive the organizational programmes that adapt successful brand and CX elements for global audiences.
Leadership can’t be delivered in a vacuum, however. Success in a territory relies on an expert, native-level understanding of its history, culture and preferences, and teams able to lean on this to adapt materials and experiences so that they express and reinforce the brand identity.
But good regional teams also need to look outwards. They need a strong understanding of the global brand and offering, and the ability to coordinate with corporate and other regional groups.
Basics such as strong document and workflow management are a must, along with software-based tools for effective collaboration between regions and time zones.
Clearly, localization tools and workflows are a core component of the modern toolkit for optimizing performance across territories. For example, tools like Phrase Strings allow global teams to maintain platform consistency, while tailoring voice, terminology and flows to each market. And with Phrase Orchestrator, updates move automatically through localization pipelines, keeping every region aligned with minimal manual effort.
Localization and other software tools help automotive manufacturers plan and enact localized strategies, increasing consistency and minimizing their go-to-market costs. At the same time, they’re key to actioning the tweaks and improvements needed as the market matures, and the brand develops and leverages its localized identity.
Conclusion: relevance is the new speed
In the fast-changing, heavily disrupted automotive industry, cultural relevance is emerging as the new measure of speed and success. Without it, speed-to-market doesn’t translate into results, and new brand and product launches struggle for relevance. This misalignment is a silent drag on your global growth engine: the unifying factor explaining the failure to carry strong brand propositions with you into new territories.
Leading automotive brands counter this by approaching customer connection as a strategy – not just an outcome. By supporting their expansion through customer-centric, highly localized experiences, they put customer experience first.
This is the culturally sensitive alignment on which to build a strong, localized brand: your global identity, expressed in the perfect regional dialect.
Enjoyed this post? Look for the next in this series How AI can help global teams scale content at speed – without losing brand control. Or get in touch to find out how Phrase can help you realise your global ambitions.
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