Authenticity Across Cultures & Regions
Brandingmag
The independent publisher narrating the global discussion on branding and culture.
“Businesses looking to expand internationally have to find the right balance between remaining true to their global identity and values, but also tailoring communications to reflect the cultural nuances and expectations.” – Mélanie Chevalier, founder and CEO @ Creative Culture
One-size-fits-all is not a global strategy. Every region has its own background, culture, shopping habits, and pain points. And brands must be equipped with the right local insights, the right message for the right opportunity, to succeed (1). Analyzing local customers’ behavior and asking questions like What is it that makes a customer choose a local grocery store over an international retail chain? can unveil valuable indicators for meeting them where they are (2). Pair that data with cultural intelligence, emotional intelligence, hyper-personalization, and inclusion to keep your big data and research bias-free and you might just be ready to expand globally (3,4).
Mélanie Chevalier gives her take on tapping into new cultures:
“Technology is empowering us all to do incredible things. But simple translation tools are not enough to take your brand into a new market. Inclusive and accurate comms require brands to go one step further. They must maintain the style, tone, impact, and intent of their brand and campaign, but ensure they fit in with the codes, conventions, and expectations of the target market.
It needs more than just data points. Used in isolation, data-driven marketing often results in lazy, or worse, offensive creative executions. So don’t get bogged down in data and trends. AI and algorithms only address the tip of the iceberg – without cultural insight and local experts, you won’t see what’s really there and why.
Keeping up with culture and local trends requires insight from intelligent human surveillance in the market. Brands can use this insight to create concepts that work well with target audiences or to know when to back off from certain themes and ideas. Using good old common sense is often enough and involving local experts such as semioticians can be decisive in successfully engaging new cultures.
Transcreation over translation
Often, the challenge for global brands is ensuring consistency across communication outputs while remaining unique and locally insightful across all markets. Translation doesn’t go far enough to solve this. Only by linguistically and culturally adapting messages using native transcreators can brands mitigate against the risks of getting the brand voice and message wrong.
Transcreation ensures that idioms and expressions are carefully adapted to ensure the final result relays messaging clearly and naturally to audiences who speak the target language. Cultural references are also adapted to best resonate with the local audience. Doing so ensures that there is a strong and consistent brand tone of voice across markets and, ultimately, increases the effectiveness of the brand message and creative.”
Milos Milosevic delves into hyper-localization – what it’s all about, why global brands should be aware of it, and some of his best practices:
“When a marketer creates content or a manufacturer creates a product, they can introduce hyper-localization by personalizing the product. This simply means utilizing the customer data available at the regional and city levels.
Here are the different forms of localization:
Hyper-localization campaigns can give brands a competitive advantage and tend to be more memorable than other marketing options. They show that the brand is considerate and understands the local needs, customs, and trends.
Brands don’t only limit the concept to their customers. They can also introduce localization in their regional and city offices. This makes their employees their advocates in the local markets as well.
It is important to take the time to research the local market you want your brand to expand into. Take the time to really understand the customs and needs of the target audience in that area, and then utilize the data you have to personalize your customer’s experience and your product offerings as much as you can.”
Kevin Perlmutter names 3 key areas brand leaders should focus on if they want to lead the way to the future of branding:
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“Greater brand-led emotional intelligence
In my perfect view of the future of branding, emotional intelligence is ubiquitous and fully leveraged so that brands can truly make people’s lives better. Emotional intelligence is a term typically used to rate the ability of individuals to recognize their own emotions and those of others, use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior, and adjust emotions to adapt to environments. More and more, brands will also be expected to have a high degree of emotional intelligence when it comes to customers and the world at large.
As the impact of emotion has come more into light, so has the discussion about neuroscience, such as the popularized System-1/System-2 work of Daniel Kahneman. His research highlights that the large majority (up to 95%) of decisions we make are instinctive and subconscious occurring in the limbic part of our brain which guides emotion, motivation, behavior, and memory. This has led to an increase of neuroscience-based research capabilities disrupting traditional research approaches that brands have historically relied upon.
Greater brand-led hyper-personalization
Personalization has been around for some time. Increasingly, however, a combination of deeper insight and technological advances make it easier for brand leaders to create more desirable brand experiences through hyper-personalization.
Regardless of product category, hyper-personalization will give people infinite possibilities for experiences that are curated and designed for individual preferences. Brands that lead the way in making this possible will earn higher emotional engagement and appeal.
Greater brand-led inclusion and altruism
In my perfect view of the future of branding, brands use their reach and influence to guide society at large to be more inclusive and altruistic. There are many examples of brands that have brought attention to causes and created movements to improve the lives of people.?
Brands that primarily exist to sell products and services also have tremendous influence when it comes to societal causes. There’s an abundance of research to prove that companies that authentically and altruistically support these causes are more attractive consumers.”
Mélanie Chevalier tops up her authenticity approach by showing how brand leaders can see past the numbers using the all-important cultural intelligence lens:
“Rather than just determining cultural influences and segmenting by place of birth or parent nationality, utilising methodologies like anonymous focus groups and applying a nuanced approach to data collection will yield better results and a deeper understanding of an audience compared to the more traditional segmentation.?
Three key areas to consider prior to data research
Think beyond demographic data
When setting out your initial data parameters look past the traditional layer of demographics such as gender and ethnicity. Culture transcends statistics and socially constructed categorisation. Think about your audience, their lived experiences and how that translates to the data you are trying to gather.
Fight fear culture and create dialogue
When collecting sensitive data, you need to make sure that you create open, safe spaces for people to express their perceptions and provide a place where their voices are heard. Creating a dialogue with your audience counteracts fear culture and will return far better results than traditional methods of research. Another proven method is allowing participants to use an alias so they can anonymously express their true feelings.
De-bias the research processes and engage with communities
The way to de-bias your research and make sure it is inclusive is to involve underrepresented communities from conception. Build your questionnaires and methodologies by continuously engaging with these communities to understand what the right way to approach and phrase things is. This process shouldn’t stop at the research stage, but should continue through product development, service development, and beyond.”
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