3 ways we balance global and local marketing

In a growing international company, one of the big questions you eventually grapple with is how to balance your global brand with local marketing. There is always a tension between the idea of a universal campaign strategy—a central marketing office plans every campaign and hands them off to the various countries’ teams, who localize them for their markets—or going fully local and giving each team full autonomy in its respective market.

The global approach is certainly more efficient: You have one creative team, you only make one set of assets, and then you deploy them to your teams around the world. On the other hand, these campaigns don’t necessarily resonate with global audiences. Either they will be obviously created for a market that is foreign to many of your potential customers, or your marketing will have watered its content down too much, compromising on the credibility of the story in order to appeal to everyone at once.

An all-local approach, on the other hand, in which you empower your local teams to create their own independent campaigns, allows your company to speak directly to and fully connect with each market. But it comes at the cost of consistency; you can end up with multiple facets that are not well connected, and lose the ability to be an instantly recognizable brand.

In my experience, nearly every international company is trying to find the middle ground between these two extremes—and I think we’ve struck exactly the right balance at Duolingo . We have true synergy between empowering local marketing teams and defining the broader brand on the global level in support of those individual teams. So how did we get here?

Trusting our gut

Finding this balance is a matter of figuring out how to unleash the creative freedom of local teams without letting them stray beyond the boundary of what is recognizably Duolingo. By distilling the essence of what makes our brand unique, we defined a perimeter within which local teams can play and create the right stories to resonate with their audiences while still feeling on-brand.

One guardrail we’ve set is a brand style guide that explains our tone and summarizes the types of content that have worked for us. We’re lucky because we can rely on Duo and our cast of characters, which serve as a visual cue that any given marketing campaign or asset is uniquely Duolingo, even the hyperlocal.?

Still, it’s close to impossible to explain in words how our specific kind of humor works. Instead, we train our teams by showing them our best examples and some do’s and don’ts, and then taking them through the process of building an actual social campaign from the first genesis of the idea through the actual creation of the content. That way, they can really see how our brand comes to life, absorbing and integrating the kind of humor that feels right, so that they can replicate and translate it in a way that works authentically and credibly in their local markets.

In short, we give our teams the ability to communicate our brand in an authentic way—and then we trust their gut.?

Keeping an ear to the ground

The other side of authenticity, of course, is making sure we are listening to our communities to understand what resonates locally.?

Our local teams have their fingers on the pulse of the cultural touchpoints for each market, and their primary source is social listening. We like to say: “The brief is in the comments,” meaning that whatever people are talking about with each other—from the comments of an Instagram post to a subreddit—should somewhat dictate our creative. We use a lot of the user-created Duolingo “lore” as the inspiration and the starting point for our work. If it's something they care about, then it is something they will authentically connect with.

One thing we have learned, for example, is that while our mascot Duo is popular in markets around the world, our emo teen character Lily resonates much more with our Chinese audience. A large part of our user base in China is made up of school-age girls, who are under a great deal of pressure to do well in school and conform to a specific ideal, and they feel a deep kinship with this purple-haired teenager who is sassy and doesn’t try to fit in. The idea of having more time for yourself, building a better work-life balance, is gaining momentum for the younger generation, and we’ve built lore around Lily that taps into that—from kicking off a V-tuber channel that Lily “runs” to creating a life-sized Lily mascot suit that our China team can use on social.?

Once you have defined your brand for your teams, they are free to find their own ways of connecting with the local market. They can experiment in their communities, trying different ideas, different storylines, and then doubling down on the ones that gain traction. Giving them the freedom to find what works allows them to really communicate your brand in a way that feels locally informed and, yes, authentic.

Local testimony, with global resonance

The truth is, an approach to marketing that is grounded in the specific needs and perspectives of different markets around the world has been built into our DNA at Duolingo, because we have always been in tune with why people across the world want to learn very different languages. It’s built into our onboarding flow—we ask every user, “Why are you here?” (Options include things like: support my education, prepare for travel, etc.)

For our English-speaking users, motivation comes down to curiosity and personal interest: they have a trip planned, they want to broaden their horizons, they’ve always dreamed about speaking Spanish or French, or they want to brush up on what they learned at school.?

In markets like Brazil, India, Japan, France or China, though, the majority of people use Duolingo to learn English. And they do so because English opens doors for them, to help them get a better career, a better life, or support their family better. Their language learning journey has higher stakes.?

Therefore a unified global approach to our brand would simply never have made sense for us. Our marketing has to be informed by the significantly different reasons that people have for using our product. And so a lot of our campaigns in markets like Brazil and India are focused on proving our credibility and our efficacy, by letting our users in those countries tell their own stories about how learning English on Duolingo has helped to help them better their lives.

We could write scripts and hire actors to tell stories about how Duolingo has improved things for them, but we believe that testimonials only work really well when they come from an authentic point of view. You can’t fake it. In order to resonate with local audiences, the stories have to come from real people in a way that is convincing and believable.?

That’s why we don’t just listen to what our communities are talking about. We also go out and ask them directly to tell us about their experiences with Duolingo. That’s how we get the most interesting and resonant stories (and also how we found out about Amanda and Rob!).

In short, the key to balancing the local and the global is to be as authentic as possible—authentic to the core of our brand, and authentic to the interests and culture of each particular audience. Focusing on what we truly believe in and stand for guarantees that our brand can speak to any community in its own uniqueness while retaining our special, recognizable identity on the global level.