Think Global, Speak Local: The Power of Personalized Localization in Building a Customer-Centric Brand

When launching a multinational campaign, is reach or relevance more of a priority?

How do brands ensure they are striking the right balance? Many companies have learned the hard way that a scattergun approach to internationalization not only delivers poor value for money but can also negatively impact customer loyalty and brand reputation. 

If companies don’t prioritize relevance in different regional markets, their campaigns could be mistargeted and the meaning of brand messages lost.

At worst, they could even be offensive, inappropriate, or tone-deaf to the local audience. Beer brand Coors discovered this the hard way in the 80s when it launched its “Turn It Loose” campaign in Spain. Although successful in the US, the campaign’s strapline didn’t translate well internationally. For instance, when translated into Spanish, the phrase is commonly interpreted as “suffer from diarrhea.” While this campaign made an impact in the Spanish market, it’s for all the wrong reasons.

When launching global campaigns, companies must ensure that core messaging does not get lost in translation.

Many brands still struggle with localization as they prioritize simple language translation. They often fail to conduct the in-depth research needed to understand how their campaigns will resonate in different international markets.

When brands adopt a strategic approach, their marketing campaigns, content, and messaging resonate more effectively with local audiences. Companies reap the benefits of deeper engagement and improved brand positioning.

When brands prioritize local relevance, they gain a foothold in new markets, acquire new customers, build goodwill and loyalty, and benefit from a boost in sales.

An international, well-planned transnational strategy delivers substantial value for money without significant additional costs.  

A Successful Global Strategy Begins with Extensive Research

The roadmap for an international marketing strategy begins with solid planning and analysis and includes comprehensive market research, gathering data on linguistic trends, cultural nuances, and customer demographics. Marketers must evaluate the needs of each global market and define their target audience for each local region. 

In particular, it is mission-critical to understand the linguistic nuances of each market, including regional dialects, local phrases, and slang.

Then, there are phrases that defy translation completely. Beyond communication alone, language is a complex amalgamation of culture, emotion, and identity.

Duolingo celebrated the beauty of the untranslatable phrase with the launch of its #EnglishMeinNahinJamta campaign (which means “It doesn’t translate in English”), using phrases understood by locals across different regions in India that do not have a direct translation in English. 

Research was essential for the success of this campaign, and Duolingo undertook a comprehensive survey to understand how people across India incorporated different phrases into their daily language. 

Adapting Formats, Imagery and Communication Style

For markets where locals read from right to left, creating right-to-left (RTL) landing pages is one of the more technical aspects of localization.

BSC Education, an organization targeting international audiences for English language courses, found that its initial marketing campaign in English converted poorly. Native language users were not able to understand the marketing material. 

The agency then shifted its approach by creating localized landing pages in Arabic. This required adapting email campaigns, landing pages, and ads to align with Arabic’s right-to-left formatting.

The results included a 2.5x increase in the conversion rate of Arabic landing pages and a 9.4% increase in email open rates, with clickthrough rates increasing by 10%. 

Adapting the imagery by tailoring campaigns to reflect local tastes and preferences is also essential for executing successful multinational campaigns.

In the Middle East McDonald’s recreated its popular “Raise Your Arches” campaign but adapted the content to incorporate local insight and culture.

McDonald’s internationally recognized brand transcends culture or geography, and while the underlying message was the same globally, localizing the campaign details meant it resonated more deeply with regional audiences. 

At the heart of McDonald’s success is the ability to identify universal values and formulate a core message that resonates globally.

The powerful combination of the globally recognized and iconic arches, layered with inclusive language, cultural insights, and localized images, resulted in a highly effective marketing success story. 

Farfetch: Building the Business Case for Localization in the Luxury Fashion Market

Understanding the business case and rationale for investing in localization is paramount, particularly for brands starting their journey to international expansion.

According Alex Katsambas, Head of Linguistic Services at Farfetch, customers in key luxury fashion markets like China, Germany, and France expect communication in their local language. This expectation is backed by tangible improvements in financial performance.

However, when organizations step into unfamiliar territories, they need data, performance analysis, and metrics to build the business case for internationalization. 

For Farfetch’s analysts, this entailed defining brand-specific metrics to measure success, including conversion rate, number of visitors, and number of converted visitors.

It’s important to recognize that entering new markets may not lead to an immediate boost in performance or sales. Achieving success in a new market requires time, patience, and a strategic approach. Building brand awareness, understanding local consumer behavior, and gaining customer trust are gradual processes that unfold over time.

The brand undertook comprehensive analysis with metrics continuously monitored and data gathered over at least a year.

Part of the reason for the long-term strategy is building brand awareness from local consumers who previously may not expect tailored content in their home language.

From an SEO perspective, boosting search visibility through localized content takes time, especially considering that some markets may have their own preferred search engines. 

As Katsambas notes, when Farfetch launched in Denmark, performance showed an uplift over the second half of the year post launch: 

Performance marketing changes…it takes time, and from a brand perspective, the Danish consumer started seeing something in Danish…the local consumer is not used to it. They are not used to having big websites trying to break into the market, targeting in the local language…That is brand awareness, and that builds up, and the second half of the year after we launched, everything started going up, and I think it is just because everything was in place.”—Alex Katsambas, Head of Linguistic Services, Farfetch

The analysis must form part of a long-term strategy; success is often a part of the three-to-five-year plan. When Farfetch launched its website in Mexican Spanish, it was one of its smaller markets. Three years later, Mexico transformed into one of Farfetch’s more significant markets, projected to surpass the hundred million dollar mark. 

AI Produces Effective, Seamless Localization at Scale

Adapting marketing content by incorporating local insights and cultural nuances for specific markets is vital for success and results in deeper engagement, higher conversion rates, and greater customer loyalty.

But how can marketers increase the efficiency and scalability of global campaigns? 

When entering an international market, relying solely on human translation can lead to longer lead times, increased effort, and higher costs, making it difficult to scale up quickly and achieve a fast time-to-market.

Technology such as generative AI can enable global brands to produce multilingual, informative, and conversational content for international markets with a rapid turnaround. 

Companies are already harnessing AI-powered solutions such as ChatGPT for basic content translation. However, human editing is often necessary to refine the content, ensuring it aligns with the subtleties of slang, regional dialects, and language nuances. Without this additional layer of oversight, brands risk generating low-quality output that may not reflect their authentic tone of voice.

When generative AI is combined with advanced localization technology, it has the potential to transform the speed and quality of translations, enabling marketers to localize content on a large scale more efficiently.

The Phrase Platform combines the power of generative AI with cutting-edge, cloud-based translation technology to fine-tune automated machine translations for maximum impact, efficiency and most importantly quality.

The focus is not just on translation but also on precision and accuracy so that translated content conveys the brand’s intended meaning. 

The technology includes Auto LQA, a capability that equips marketing and localization teams with the ability to quickly analyze the quality of localized content and produce an in-depth and automated assessment to feed into continuous improvement.

The quality of translated content is often subjective, but Auto LQA takes away that uncertainty for an accurate evaluation. Auto LQA fine-tunes translated content while ensuring consistent messaging across different markets.

Automating difficult and complex processes enables global teams to minimize the reliance on manual editing, thus reducing the time-to-market of multinational campaign launches efficiently and at scale. 

Personalization is No Longer a Nice-to-Have but a Consumer Expectation

Targeting and personalization are now the norm and tailored customer experiences are what today’s consumers expect.

A cookie-cutter approach simply won’t cut it, as highlighted by the Harvard Business Review as early as 2006; businesses that traditionally made their money by pursuing standardization are now relentlessly focused on adapting products for different markets. 

Technology platforms, such as Phrase, enable businesses to leverage customization across different markets and adapt their strategies for diverse global audiences. This allows them to deliver tailored customer experiences at scale efficiently and cost-effectively, without compromising quality.