Executive summary
Most executives agree that customer experience drives growth. But few realize how much of that experience depends on one word: localization.
In this episode of In Other Words, Nataly Kelly, Chief Marketing Officer at Zappi, joins host Jason Hemingway to challenge the perception of localization as a cost center. Drawing on decades at HubSpot, CSA Research and more, Nataly explains why the companies that win globally are those that make cultural fluency part of their growth DNA.
From tying localization to revenue metrics, to designing customer journeys that adapt to cultural nuance, Nataly shares a framework for transforming language from an operational function into a strategic driver. Her message to global leaders is to stop translating your brand, start scaling your relationships.
From interpreter to international strategist
Nataly Kelly began her career as a Spanish interpreter for AT&T. “I was literally someone else’s voice,” she recalls. “And I realized how hard it is to communicate across cultures, even one to one, let alone one to many.”
That early insight that words and meaning aren’t the same, would shape a career that spans research, marketing, and international growth. From leading product development in the language services sector, to serving as Chief Research Officer at CSA Research, Nataly’s work has always revolved around one question. How do brands connect meaningfully as they expand into new markets.
At HubSpot, she found the answer went beyond translation. It was strategy. During her eight-year tenure, she helped scale the company from $170 million to $1.7 billion ARR, launching operations in over 120 countries and redefining localization as a business growth function.
From cost center to growth engine
Nataly is direct about the challenge. “Most companies won’t invest a penny in localization unless they see growth behind it,” she says. “You have to tie localization to top-line outcomes.”
At HubSpot, she did just that by tracking language-influenced revenue, quantifying the lift in ARR directly tied to localized content and customer experiences. “When I could show that non-English markets were lifting our global growth by four percentage points, localization stopped being a cost,” she says. “It became a growth lever.”
Her advice to localization and marketing leaders is speak the language of the boardroom. “Pay attention to how the CEO and CFO talk about growth. “If they talk about MRR, talk about MRR. If they talk about install base or churn, translate your impact into those same terms.”
Internal influence: how to get a seat at the table
For localization leaders, Nataly argues, influence doesn’t come from volume, but from alignment.
“We gain trust when we say, ‘Tell me about your goals. How does your org work? How can I help you?’”“It’s like internal marketing. You’re running a campaign to create awareness of your value.”
At HubSpot, that approach turned her internal partners into advocates. “My German marketing stakeholders once went into budget season asking for five more localization specialists,” she said. “I didn’t have to lobby for the budget, they did it for me.”
Her point is pragmatic. Most localization professionals won’t have direct access to the CEO, and that’s fine. “Influence happens at every level. Your best advocates are the people who see your impact daily.”
Cultural fluency: the new marketing differentiator
In her book Brand Global, Adapt Local, Nataly introduces the idea of cultural fluency; the ability to know when to stay consistent and when to flex.
“Brands often try to apply a global standard uniformly in every market,” she explains. “That’s how you get cookie-cutter experiences that don’t resonate.”
True cultural fluency means designing flexible brand systems with clear global guidelines that include deliberate local freedom. “Marketers and localization professionals should be best friends,” she says. “They’re both trying to make the customer feel understood. One calls it resonance, the other calls it localization. It’s the same goal.”
Every touchpoint matters
When asked where companies most often lose trust, Nataly didn’t hesitate, “Billing and payments.”
At HubSpot, she discovered that automated payment reminders in Japan were being sent with U.S.-style wording. It was polite by American standards, but jarringly aggressive in Japanese. “The translation was accurate.But it wasn’t culturally appropriate.”
Her team worked with finance and local customer success teams to adapt tone, timing, and phrasing, and saw measurable improvement in satisfaction and payment rates.
“Sometimes the smallest content has the biggest impact.A few sentences in a billing email can make or break a customer relationship.”
She also warns of “shadow localization”, when teams translate content themselves, without proper review. “It might be technically correct, but completely off-brand. That’s why cross-team collaboration is critical.”
Strategy before software
As more companies automate, Nataly sees a recurring mistake, jumping to solutions before agreeing on strategy.
“You can buy the best tech stack in the worl, but if you don’t know what problem you’re solving, you’ll just automate the wrong thing faster.”
She recommends aligning on three fundamentals before scaling globally:
- Why you’re localizing: the business goal.
- What success looks like: the KPIs that matter to leadership.
- Where to start: the highest-impact content or markets.
“Once those are clear, the workflow and tools will follow naturally.”
The AI opportunity, and what it won’t replace
AI, Nataly argues, has eliminated one of localization’s biggest bottlenecks is speed. But it hasn’t eliminated the need for strategy or empathy.
“It’s not that we couldn’t localize before.It’s that we couldn’t localize everything. Now we can… but should we?”
She likens AI to a “kid in a candy store”, able to grab everything, but missing discernment. “The question isn’t can we translate this, it’s should we, and how?”
In her view, AI will elevate human roles rather than erase them. “Project managers will move from ‘how do I get this done?’ to ‘should we even do this?’” she says. “Linguists will shift from translators to cultural strategists. The value of human judgment just went up.”
The voice of the customer
For all the talk of metrics, Nataly insists that the most powerful data point remains the simplest: the customer’s own words.
“If you share one customer quote that captures their frustration or delight, that cuts through faster than any chart.That’s the voice of the customer and it’s your best business case.”
Quantitative and qualitative insight, she added, must work together. “The numbers tell you what’s happening. The words tell you why.”
Transformation through localization
Across roles and industries, Nataly Kelly’s message stays constant, localization is not translation. It’s transformation.
When done well, it builds empathy inside organizations, trust with customers, and growth across borders. “The world isn’t getting less connected,” she says. “It’s getting more. And that means the value of cultural fluency will only rise.”
Or, as she puts it simply, “stop thinking of localization as a cost. Start thinking of it as how your brand learns to speak human.”
Hear more
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