How can a global brand maintain a consistent identity when its audiences have different expectations? Former Crayola CMO Victoria Lozano faced this challenge across a business serving children, educators, and international licensing partners. Drawing on Victoria's borrow-and-build approach, together with independent research, this article examines how businesses can maintain brand consistency while giving individual teams the freedom to respond to their customers.

Most companies define themselves by the products they sell or the categories they compete in. That definition can narrow where they look for growth. Drawing on the experience of Victoria Lozano, former CMO of Crayola, this article examines how brands can identify new business opportunities by understanding the broader needs they serve. From differentiating Dentyne and Trident at Cadbury to extending Crayola into experiences and licensing, Victoria offers lessons for executives deciding where to invest and how to take a brand into new markets.

Most requests I get for a new integration come from teams whose tools we don’t cover yet. Here’s how I’d decide, system by system, between the integrations we maintain, the ones our partners maintain and the ones you build yourself. Version 4.8.6 of our WordPress integration, released on July 17, 2026, fixed a single bug. […]

A tagline, a legal clause and a product description go wrong in different ways, so they shouldn’t share a workflow. Here’s how to decide what to automate for each content type, how to check it, and where a person still needs to be involved. My team looks after Phrase’s own localization, and we don’t use […]

Most translation workflows are optimized for speed and cost. Regulators care about something else: getting it right, and being able to prove it. When a national competent authority asks about a translated Key Information Document (KID), it rarely asks how quickly the translation was turned around. It asks who reviewed the disclosure, when, and on […]

At the first Phrase Summits in San Francisco and London, enterprise leaders showed how AI is expanding their teams’ contribution to the business. Automation results are helping them earn a more strategic role, with growing responsibility for AI governance and process design. Hands-on sessions turned ideas into working solutions, while conversations with peers gave attendees new approaches to take back to their organizations.

Sean Hopwood built his company’s own AI translation model to meet specific client needs. He also credits platforms such as Phrase with helping him grow Day Translations, and believes adopting those tools earlier would have helped the business grow further. His experience raises a question for leaders investing in AI. Which capabilities justify the ongoing commitment of building and maintaining them? This article explores the obligations behind internal AI builds and offers a framework for deciding where to build and where to buy.

Are customers committed to your brand, or would leaving be too much effort? Insights from Raja Rajamannar, Mastercard Senior Fellow and Former CMCO, challenge what repeat purchases tell us about loyalty and where global businesses should invest to give customers a reason to stay. Some customers love your brand. Others would leave if it didn’t mean moving their data or learning another system. They keep buying, so it is easy to mistake the inconvenience of leaving for loyalty. You could be spending a fortune on rewards for customers who stay because switching is a hassle. What happens when a competitor offers to handle the move for them?

How much of your brand investment still works when customers encounter your business through an interface you do not control? Wordless logos offer a revealing test of recognition, with wider implications for how global brands preserve meaning across markets. Insights from Raja Rajamannar, Mastercard Senior Fellow and Former CMCO, inform an examination of how global brands build recognition and preserve meaning across markets.