FEATURE28 January 2021

Impact Report: Localisation of research helps brands understand cultural nuance

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Richard Young

Asia Pacific Covid-19 Europe FMCG Features Impact Latin America Middle East and Africa North America Technology UK

The balance of globalisation has shifted in the past 20 years. For brands looking to target international efforts and evaluate opportunities at a global scale, tailoring their market research to local nuance is a vital first step. By Richard Young.

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The global economy is here to stay. But 2020 taught us that, within that global picture, local markets evolve unevenly, unpredictably and are subject to rapid change. That’s made multi-market insights even more essential for global brands and those planning to expand internationally as we enter a new era for regional trade relationships.

Finding the right balance between local insights and global uniformity is hard. The marketing history books are littered with examples of a basic failure to localise, often with hilarious consequences [see ‘What’s in a name?’, below]. More seriously, global brands face a challenge: ensure research controls for cultural, language and infrastructure differences, but also generate insights that can be benchmarked across markets and aggregated to inform global decisions.

“As a global brand, you want to use the same product and the same campaign everywhere, ” says Stephen Phillips, chief executive at Zappi. “You need to know how many compromises are ...