Assessment-Driven Creative Adaptations Driving Improvements In Marketing
Introducing brand assets that effectively maintain brand identity while also adapting to geographical, social and cultural customer preferences is a key differentiator for marketers today. While there are challenges of managing the logistics of localization by time pressures, cost and processes but with the emergence of increasing digital channels, newer technologies, the process can be streamlined.
How the marketing process typically works for a multinational brand is that they create an annual global marketing calendar that lists out all the activities and campaigns. To optimise costs, there is a centralised conceptualization of creatives, and then the creatives are adapted for a global roll out.
All major multinational brands usually work with a global agency on brand campaigns for the marketing initiatives through a calendar year and these creative agencies conceptualise the master assets and the key messaging for the various campaigns. This is the Hub and spoke model, which has been popular with all brands.
Limitations Of The Traditional Model
The challenge with this model is that the ‘one size fits all’ approach often leads to reduction in efficacy of the campaign as it fails to connect to the local market’s target audience.
Once the campaigns are approved, they are then rolled out to various markets around the world. The master assets are translated and adapted as per each market. Often the time between the global and the local campaign is tight, in some cases almost instantaneous. Hence the typical shortcut is to translate the content with minimum design changes, and the campaign is then rolled out. In doing so, the very essence of the campaign is lost.
The reason for the erosion in efficacy is that the campaign creatives are often adapted without keeping the local market’s cultural nuances and colloquial language in mind, and this creates a disconnect. Furthermore, the key messaging that would sell the brand off the shelfs in the western world may not trigger sales or brand preference in the eastern hemisphere.
This is the reason why, over the past decade, all major brands have struggled to optimise their creative campaign rollout cost by centralising the campaign conceptualization and master assets while effectively adapting this campaign to various markets worldwide.
How Assessment-Led Creative Adaptation Works?
To effectively implement global campaign rollouts to markets across the world – one has to simply change the lens. Instead of pushing global master assets with translated content across different markets, one needs to view the campaign from the lens of the local market and the culture of its target audience. By doing so you are able to retain elements of the campaign that the local market’s target audience can relate to and localise elements which are alien to their culture. Localisation and translation must be aligned with culture. Previously, translation was perceived as a mere transfer of
words from one language into the other, hence the term “localisation” was emphasised to underline the broader context that must be considered if a campaign is expected to deliver desired engagement and results across geographies.
This is called assessment based creative adaptation.
The Framework: Localisation of global campaigns could be achieved by applying three distinct filters to the two key components of any creative asset – Design and Copy.
1. Local market culture and nuances
2. Use of colloquial language
3. Review of the localised campaign
Design: Brands need to evaluate whether the local market target audience can relate to the globally created key visuals. If not, they need to do image work or compositing to localise the visual to the target market. Visual content inevitably encourages target audience to discover more about the product or service. It must truly resonate with people to make your campaign both culturally and contextually appropriate.
Copy: Translation is never enough. Localisation means that the content has to be necessarily diverse to include different values, lifestyles and ethnicities. Instead of just translating to the local language, content needs to be ‘Transcreated’ - taking tone and style into account including design, images and the broader context.
In transcreation, you first understand what is being said and not just translate verbatim. In a verbatim translation of the source content the key messaging often gets lost or distorted whereas in transcreation the essence of the key messaging is translated using the colloquially spoken language of the target market. This ensures that the audience is able to connect to the brand communication in a more endearing and relatable manner, and their sensitivities are not hurt.
Once the two filters are applied to localise the campaign, the effectivity of the adaptation should be tested with a cross section of the target audience. This is a qualitative analysis that helps identify any gaps in the localised campaign which can be further addressed and reworked. Once the campaign passes through this final filter, it is ready to be rolled out.
Ultimately, if you do it right, assessment driven creative adaptation certainly becomes an organic growth strategy. It helps you expand your brand reach and awareness, fosters personal connections with consumers because you humanise your brand and you showcase respect towards their culture and traditions and finally, can lead to a cost -effective process to increase the brand’s potential for sales.
The author is Amita Karwal, Managing Director, HH Global
