Try it. Open an incognito browser, switch your language settings to German or Japanese or Portuguese, and search for your brand. What you find will probably surprise you. Incomplete product information, outdated messaging, or in some markets, barely anything at all.
The brand experience in the home market and the brand experience everywhere else are two different things. Most leadership teams never see this. Yet for millions of customers, it is the version of the brand they experience every day.
How other markets see you
Global companies invest heavily in their home market. The website is polished, the product pages are optimized, the content is current and editorially consistent. Every piece of content reflects the latest brand standards.
Every other market gets a version that was converted later, often inconsistently, and often without the same editorial or brand oversight that the home market receives.
Leadership teams rarely see this because reporting, analytics, and executive attention are all concentrated on the home market. The assumption is that if the core content is strong and the language work is done, the brand experience is covered.
The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer suggests otherwise. Their research found that consumer trust in domestically headquartered brands outpaces foreign brands by an average of 15 points globally, with the divide widening to 30 points in Germany and 29 points in Canada. For global brands, that trust deficit reflects whether the content experience in each market earns the same confidence as the home market does.
2025 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Brand Trust, From We to Me
Cathy Hackl, CEO of Future Dynamics and Nokia’s Futurist-in-Residence, sees this across every industry she advises. When asked on the In Other Words podcast what advice she would give a CEO entering five new markets at once, her answer was direct.
“Find the right way to communicate. Don’t only rely on AI and work with experts that can help you and guide you.”
Most leadership teams believe they’ve already done that. The Edelman data suggests their customers disagree.
Content has changed. Most content strategies haven’t.
The challenge is accelerating because content itself has evolved. A decade ago, adapting for a new market meant converting your website and your product catalog into another language. Today, content is voice, video, in-app, gaming, spatial, community-driven. The formats are multiplying and each one needs to work across every market a brand operates in.
Cathy sees this on platforms most enterprise teams haven’t considered yet.
“There are certain experiences that perform really well in one country that might not be as popular in a different country.”
On Roblox, where Cathy built Walmart Land and worked extensively with global creator communities, real-time translation already allows kids in different countries to communicate in their own languages, and pricing adapts by region automatically.
These platforms are far from niche. Gaming is now worth more than music and Hollywood combined. And the audiences on them are already global, already multilingual, and already expecting content that feels native to their market. As Cathy highlights,
“A dollar for a skin in the U.S. means nothing. But a dollar might be a lot for a kid playing in Pakistan.”
The challenge on these platforms goes far beyond language. It includes pricing, cultural relevance, and experience design.
Cathy shared a story that brought this to life. A client wanted to partner with a 13-year-old creator in Brazil to build a branded Roblox experience. Nobody on the team spoke Portuguese. “No one spoke Portuguese, but I did,” she said. “So I got on the phone and talked to his parents and figured out a way to partner with him.” Language was the thing that made or broke the deal.
The commercial impact
Research from CSA Research, found that companies investing in adapting content for local markets were 1.5 times more likely to report a total revenue increase. Those investing to create competitive advantage through local market experiences were more than twice as likely to report increased profitability.
The numbers are clear. But the most compelling evidence comes from businesses that have acted on them.
One global premium sportswear brand, after years of running an English-first content operation across 20 languages, rebuilt its content infrastructure to deliver a genuinely local experience in every market. Within six months of launching a local-language website, sales in that market increased by 1,400%. German-language content began driving higher engagement leading to purchase than English-language content globally. A four-email Spanish-language test produced measurable engagement uplift compared to English-only communications.
The pattern was consistent across every market where the company introduced a local-language experience. Customers engage more, convert more, and buy more when they are addressed in their own language.
Yet most global businesses still treat multilingual content as a cost line. The budget for the home market content team dwarfs what is allocated to every other market combined. Quality controls that are rigorous for English content often don’t exist for other languages. And few organizations track the commercial performance of their content on a per-market, per-language basis.
Cathy made the same observation from a different angle.
She described handing Fortune 100 CEOs a Nintendo Switch and telling them to play Fortnite. “You can’t go into these worlds without understanding what they are.” The same principle applies to content. You can’t serve a market you haven’t taken the time to understand.
The five-minute audit
Google your brand in another language. If what comes back doesn’t reflect the same standard as your home market, every customer in that market can see it. So can every AI agent evaluating your brand on their behalf.
As the sportswear brand’s localization lead highlight, only 20% of the world speaks English.
The brands that close that disconnect will build trust, conversion, and market share in every market they operate in. The rest will keep wondering why their global expansion numbers never match the plan.
Watch the full conversation
Cathy Hackl is the Godmother of the Metaverse, Global Tech Futurist, Nokia’s Futurist-in-Residence and one of Newsweek’s Top 25 AI Visionaries. On the In Other Words podcast, she shares why brands may soon need to sell to AI agents as well as humans, what a generation thinking in Robux reveals about global commerce, and who owns the digital air around you when computing leaves the screen.
