Culture clash – translation and localisation

Consumer marketing is highly culture-sensitive, business marketing is largely culture-neutral. The received wisdom says so, but is it true?

Judging by never-ending debates on the subject among FMCG marketers and their agencies, consumers are still mindful of being treated firstly as French, Italian or British. For advertising to work effectively, it has to reflect the peculiar cultural sensibilities of a country and its culture.

This purist and market-tested view, emphasising the need for localised consumer campaigns, sits uncomfortably with the relentless drive for greater economies of scale in marketing and therefore for global communications solutions. The resulting and unresolved conflict fuels discussion about globalisation.

Can business marketers remain aloof and outside this debate? Is an Italian or German mid-corporate CEO moved by the same cultural and business cues as the ambitious corporate leader in Birmingham or Manchester? Or does the ‘white-van-man’ from Essex bear any resemblance to the fast-talking entrepreneur from Valencia? The balance of differences and similarities between the two dictates whether it’s going to be a one-size-fits-all approach or a localised campaign for each.

 

When we set out to plan a global brand building activity for the specialty fibres maker Ahlstrom, our research showed that design engineers fitting air or oil filters into cars at BMW looked for exactly same product attributes and service guarantees as their Italian colleagues at Fiat or British counterparts at Nissan in Sunderland.

Dieter in Munich lives a different life from Luigi in Turin, but when they come to work they look for the same things in their filter suppliers. Long-lasting, high-quality and safe filters are equally important to them, regardless of the country of origin. They are both responsible for making sure that when a BMW or Fiat reaches the consumer, the car works reliably, and that the marque’s reputation is not tarnished by failing filters.

A business marketer who does his homework thoroughly will find that more often than not his or her target audience is relatively immune to cultural differences in their work. Globally applied quality standards and internationally shared market expectations, business imperatives and management approaches leave little room for Dieter and Luigi to act solo or follow their ‘cultural instincts’. Sad maybe, but true for sure.

Therefore no wonder we ended up with a single-minded pan-European audience definition for the Ahlstrom campaign across several target industry sectors. And what’s more, our vertical audiences were closely aligned in terms of professional values and supplier expectations.

It is this audience analysis and identification of similarities that powered our creative planning. It became obvious that our job was to create one pan-national and pan-cultural campaign. Not because it was more economic, but because it was what was appropriate for the market and would work.

Once the need and strategy for a pan-European campaign was sorted, the international campaign mission and creative brief fell out without much problem. Ahlstrom deal with fibres, natural and artificial. They create a tailored ‘cocktail’ for a customer to meet their performance requirements in application. Industry by industry, customer by customer. Customised fibre solutions add more value to the end product in many sectors – surgical gowns, wallpaper backing, air filters, baking moulds, sailing boats, beer labels or tea bags.

The brief resulted in a creative theme ‘Small fibres – Big difference’ highlighting how the right fibre solution helps Ahlstrom’s customer gain a market advantage, either in terms of product superiority or cost benefit. Now this is the sort of business language that appeals to any manufacturer in any culture or country.

 

But there is still one last hurdle, which sounds more controversial than what is intended. The natural tendency of any agency creative is to want to produce that Oscar-winning item. And if you don’t watch out, the creative solution gets in the way of effective communication. Form starts to overpower function, the creative idea turns into a vampire instead of facilitating the selling process.

A further trouble with those devilish vampires is that they are typically very culture-bound. They derive from local language, events, history, mentality, people or popular culture. Therefore these campaigns travel poorly, they don’t translate, they feel alien. In other words, they are bad selling.

From campaigns like Ahlstrom, one learns an important lesson: know your pan-European or global audience and study what makes them tick. When their business drivers are clear, more often than not you’ll find there is a surprising level of commonality between people from different cultural spheres. This makes communication across borders easier.

You may ask: ‘if buying motives are culture-independent, will creative solutions be bland because you cannot use specific cultural cues’? To answer this it is useful to think about ‘culture’. There is more to its meaning than just ‘nationalistic’. Businesses have cultures, so do industries and functions within organisations. Just stop to think for a moment how uniformly financial directors behave everywhere!

Therefore creatives have plenty of cultural cues at their disposal to spice up communications without having to resort to ‘national means’. This generates ideas that can have a lot of cut-through and work to impact fully in any language area. It is simply not true to assert that a campaign developed for multiple markets is by definition less creative or lacking in character.

If the campaign idea is universal to begin with it is naturally easy for translators. On this very point it may be advisable to use another phrase – ‘transcreation’. We’ve all seen direct, literal translations from one language to another, and they simply do not read well and in the worst case may alienate a reader ie. a potential customer.

Not that one should duplicate creative work, but one should simply acknowledge that a sales person talks differently from one market to another. Any piece of communication is like a sales representative. Therefore make sure he or she is well recruited and tunes into the local environment.

 

On the other hand, is a purely domestically-conceived campaign developed for the local market doomed to fail elsewhere? The answer, in many cases, is unfortunately yes. But not if you are willing to re-analyse and re-purpose your plan in a multi-market context. By reverse engineering the campaign, as described in Ahlstrom’s case, and by being totally honest about what you find out, a domestic campaign may still have relevance internationally. At least it can serve as a platform for an internationalised version and therefore save time and money for the project team.

Whichever the case, there is one further overriding success factor in international business marketing: make sure you involve your local markets and their management, marketing team, sales people and channels in planning. Not once have I been in a situation whereby a client subsidiary’s sales team contradicts the local creative agency team’s views about the suitability of a creative solution. These contradictions are almost as a rule the result of inadequate participation by and contributions from, the local sales team. You ignore them at your peril. And it’s got nothing to do with different cultures and languages, but everything to do with how we human beings function – regardless of nationality.

  •  Define and decide your audience single-mindedly.
  • Get to know your customers’ true business drivers across markets.
  • Connect your value offering with the drivers.
  • Involve local markets in planning.
  • Rise above ‘national cultures’. 
  •  Expect an agency team to do the same.
  • Look for a creative idea or concept that connects with business cultures.
  • Transcreate, not just translate. 
  •  If you have to, re-purpose a local campaign.

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