6 brand localization tips from experienced brand marketers

3. Understand cultural preferences and differences

Part of understanding your target audience and market is coming to grips with the cultural preferences and values that differ from your home market. The style, tone, and messaging that work in your existing market may not work in the new one.

Consider the cultural nuances in the way you communicate your brand. This includes your brand colors, icons, and images. Sean said,” It’s essential you understand how things like colors and numbers are viewed in the target culture." For example, in Western cultures, the color white is often associated with purity and innocence; in Eastern cultures, white can be associated with death and mourning.

There may be other religious and cultural sensitivities you need to be aware of. For example, if you’re moving into a market where a high percentage of the population is vegetarian, you wouldn’t want to include images of burgers or steaks in your advertising. These would alienate your target audience and make them feel your products aren’t for them.

And it’s not just the visual representation of your brand you need to think about. The tone of voice for your marketing content may also need to change to suit local preferences. For example, Netflix commissions original content for local markets, such as the highly acclaimed series Sacred Games, for its Indian market. The series is set in Mumbai and was originally produced in Hindi (though you can watch it with subtitles in other languages.) Using the local language and setting makes Sacred Gamed more relevant to the target audience.

Katrina Balmaceda is a former accounts director who worked for a Singapore-based e-commerce fulfillment company that was expanding into the Philippines. They struggled to find the desired tone that connected with the local market.

She explained, “In the Philippines, people often prefer a light-hearted tone. So, we infused the articles with humor related to recent local trends and events, as well as expressions in the local language.”

4. Invest in translation

Communicating with your target audience in their native language can help you build an authentic connection with them. But it can also cause a disconnect — especially if you rely only on online tools like Google Translate.

If you truly want to connect with your new market, you need to think of the process as “transcreation” rather than translation. By adapting the content, rather than translating it verbatim, you capture the cultural nuance, get the tone right, and recreate the emotion evoked by your original content. For Alex Kracov, CEO and co-founder at Dock, translation was a challenge. He explained, “A difficult part of localizing marketing campaigns is making sure that your ads and content are translated properly. Of course, you can hire a translation agency. But the hard part is around proofreading and the style of the translation.”

“My recommendation is to find friends or colleagues in local markets who can review the translation agency’s work,” he added. “We’d ask multiple colleagues to look at the same translation to make sure we got it right.” Working with people who speak the language will help you achieve the desired tone and feel with your translated content.

“Work with local content creators,” recommends Katrina. “If you can’t do that, at least have someone local to go over your content and act as a ‘cultural translator’ for you. Get them to point out things that don’t work, things that are obvious to the local audience but not to you, like if the tone is too stiff and formal. These things are hard to spot if you’re not a native speaker.”

5. Create localized marketing content

Localized content will help you connect with your target audience and position your brand as a reputable company in the market. In addition, you build trust and authority in your brand by demonstrating relevance to your target customers and showing you understand their motivations and priorities.

Digge found that “localized content worked really well. We created guides that were tailored to each country.” They explained, “This helped position our brand as a local authority. We frequently had rich snippets appearing in Google search results for that market, which helped generate a lot of relevant organic traffic and leads.”

Localized content helps to increase brand reputation and relevance in your target market. Some ways to localize your content include:

• Translating your content into the local language
• Considering cultural holidays and celebrations for your marketing campaigns
• Adding visuals and images that resonate with your new market
• Including examples from local brands, celebrities, or experts in your content

Katrina found that localizing their content helped strengthen their position in the Philippine market. She said, “We considered Philippine holidays when talking about e-commerce promos. And for articles about how to create a blog for your e-commerce business, we used examples of blogs created by Philippine e-commerce companies. This supported our advice with relevant, contextual examples that demonstrated our understanding of the market.”

6. Know what to keep and what to change

You’re not creating a new, separate brand when localizing a brand. You still need to represent your global brand’s core values and identity. Understanding where your brand can adapt to suit the preferences and values of your new market will be critical.

Jessalynn explained, “Our biggest challenge was creating a cohesive, yet localized, messaging, branding, and marketing plan. We also needed an action plan for phasing out old versions of the localized brand that didn’t properly relate to our global brand. But we needed to do that in a way that wouldn’t damage brand recognition or affect our reputation in the local market.”

Creating a successful, localized brand requires an in-depth understanding of your brand identity. First, you need to define the core aspects of that identity. That will help you work out the elements that need to stay the same to maintain and increase brand recognition.

Katrina said, “Decide in advance the non-negotiables for your brand. These might be the tone, standards, visual style, values, or other marketing components. Whatever they are — these must remain consistent across all your localized content in different countries.”

Then, work out the elements that have a degree of flexibility. These are the elements that can change to fit in with cultural differences and preferences. For example, Takeaway.com uses different brand names in local markets but keeps its vibrant orange color palette and knife-and-fork logo.