How marketing localization wins far-flung customers and avoids gaffes

One argument for getting marketing localization right is the crises that can erupt when brands get it disastrously wrong.

Just ask Dolce & Gabbana. In 2018, the Italian fashion house produced a video campaign featuring a Chinese model struggling to eat Italian fare including pizza and cannoli with chopsticks. Following accusations that the ads were racist, major Chinese retailers removed the brand’s products from their websites, the brand canceled a Shanghai fashion show, and its eponymous owners issued a video apology.

Or ask Ikea, which in 2012 airbrushed women out of photos in a Saudi Arabia catalog, presumably to appease government censors, and which also ended up apologizing.

Whether it’s adapting messaging from one country to another, or one city to another, marketing localization is where brands connect with consumers by demonstrating their cultural literacy. And it’s about much more than hiring a translator.

Lost in translation? Not these brands

The Strategy Institute lauds what it calls Starbucks’s “multidomestic approach” to international markets, where the brand “meticulously analyzes local coffee drinking habits, social norms, and economic conditions to understand nuanced preferences.” Such an approach, it continues, includes “customized food items—China sees xiaolongbao dumplings while India indulges in masala chai lattes.”

Originally produced in Britain in the 1935, Kit Kats marketed in Japan are so immersed in Japanese culture and tastes that a New York Times Magazine article noted many consumers there think it’s a brand native to Japan.

Along with having such regional flavors as sake, wasabi, and Tokyo Banana, the way Kit Kats are sold in Japan also is unique.

“The Kit Kat has range” in Japan, the magazine stated. “It’s found in department stores and luxurious Kit Kat-devoted boutiques that resemble high-end shoe stores…stacked in slim boxes and tucked inside ultrasmooth-opening drawers, which a well-dressed, multilingual sales clerk slides open for you as you browse.”

So instructive is the example that the Harvard Business Impact even published a business case study about the Kit Kat execution in Japan to teach marketing students about how Nestlé Japan began rolling it out in 2008.

Listen first, then launch

Staying within the US, Whole Foods launched its Local and Emerging Accelerator Program (LEAP) in 2022 to get more products from local markets on shelves. Whole Foods’s website features such brands on a section of its website that encourages shoppers to explore products made in their region that are available at their local stores.

Lokalise, which makes a localization platform for businesses, wrote in a blog post that brands entering new markets should use social listening tools to get the lay of the land before developing an approach. The company also suggests going to Yelp (or one of its local equivalents) and reading reviews of similar offerings there to gain “a good perspective of their pain point and where current solutions fall short.”

While major brands have no shortage of in-house marketing muscle, Lokalise encourages those entering new markets to engage local marketers and influencers “to get faster entry to popular channels” and “build credibility quickly and penetrate the market.”

Lokalise stressed that localization is about much more than getting the language right.

“In short,” it wrote, “authentic localization goes far beyond translation.”