Blog - Localisation

We all know that you need to localize your content when taking your brand across the globe. The message you emit is important to any audience you target and literal translations of the message won’t always cut it. But who would have thought that sometimes a brand name change is in order?

When you have a marketing campaign with an international audience in mind, it always pays to take lessons from the best global brands in the game. Time and again these brands show us how global marketing should be done (and sometimes how it shouldn’t) so listen up and take some notes.

One of the toughest questions in modern marketing is how far you should localise your brand when you take it overseas. Audiences are larger and more connected than ever, but they also have a wider access to your brand via a range of online and offline channels – so where do you draw the line?

Multilingual websites are a basic necessity when you want to target foreign speaking markets with your brand. But, not only do you end up with multiple websites to maintain and extra search, marketing and content strategies to think about – but the setup process of your multilingual site is a challenge in itself.

There are many potential pitfalls when it comes to translation, but humour is probably the most difficult to pull off without falling into trouble. This is because many of our best jokes and funny quips rely on some sort of word play, like puns.

As the use of video as a marketing tool continues to increase year on year, smart marketers are cottoning on to the fact that localising their videos will help them reach a far wider audience.

Game localisation essentially means adapting the game to make it relevant to its players in terms of specific cultural references, humour and terminology. It has become recognised as quite an art, not least through infamously amusing and much shared examples of translation failure in the early days, like these.