Trust is cultural before it is commercial
Understanding different local cultures is the backbone of global marketing, and in fact, meeting customers in their native language can be the key difference between building trust and losing your audience completely. Content that’s delivered in a customer’s own language helps facilitate clearer understanding and creates a sense of familiarity and trust. If a brand speaks on a sensitive topic incorrectly, it could alienate its audience, but if it’s able to show understanding of culturally sensitive topics, it can build bridges with local communities.
This means that brands should align their values with local norms and communicate on familiar cultural turf in order to earn cultural trust, which will, in turn, help commercial messages truly land with a loyal audience who feel understood rather than simply marketed to.
What cultural intelligence really means in marketing
Cultural intelligence in marketing is about truly understanding the audience’s world, rather than simply translating words to be linguistically correct. It can also be defined as the ability to understand and navigate different cultural norms.
What marketers need to do is go beyond just thinking about language and adapt every nuance of tone, imagery, and context to local values, beliefs, and customs. Companies should develop genuine cultural fluency and act with added empathy and awareness to foster connections with diverse audiences, which often involves gathering real insights and using authentic storytelling to deepen the impact.
As an example, brands can use consumer data to create human-focused narratives that show they understand and can meet specific customer needs.
Cultural intelligence is a way to get into the mind of local users and understand how they might interpret different information, and it should be used as a strategic compass that guides content creation at every step to make sure campaigns resonate on an emotional and cultural level with local audiences.
Why multilingual audiences don’t behave the same way
Different language groups have distinct cultures, habits, and expectations, and every language effectively represents a separate market segment with its own needs, preferences, and behaviors. That means a campaign that works in one country may not resonate in another.
For instance, music tastes on streaming services can vary dramatically by region, and when Spotify’s teams learned that Indian listeners wanted city-specific and regional playlists, the company launched “Sound of City” charts for Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, and Chennai, along with Bollywood/Tollywood-themed mixes.
Understanding what would work in these specific regions allowed Spotify to engage each audience with content they cared about, reminding us that global audiences aren’t a uniform thing and that marketers need to do their homework to tailor messaging and experiences to each linguistic market.
When translation is correct, but the message still feels wrong
If content is translated without understanding the cultural implications, it could easily miss the mark, potentially harming the brand. Consider KFC’s blunder when they originally opened up in China with their famous slogan, “Finger-lickin’ good” being directly translated into something along the lines of, “Eat your fingers off”. That may have been technically accurate, but certainly not the image KFC was trying to display. Likewise, when the American Dairy Association took its “Got Milk?” campaign abroad, the straightforward Spanish translation came out as “¿Está usted lactando?” or “Are you lactating?”.
These gaffes show that even grammatically correct translations can misfire if the idioms or connotations don’t carry over into the new language.
This is why many brands invest in transcreation rather than translation, and culturally adapt the underlying idea and tone, so the message feels natural and appropriate in each culture, rather than verbatim from the original.
Case study: adapting a global campaign to local cultural signals
In late 2025, Netflix ran a novel Stranger Things promotion in Mexico that highlighted its true cultural adaptation. Instead of just translating a trailer, Netflix produced a cinematic short film starring Mexican UFO journalist Jaime Maussan, investigating real local legends.
The ad looked and felt like a genuine episode, and was fully committed to the show’s eerie, nostalgic style while weaving in Mexico’s fascination with paranormal folklore. Netflix gave creative control to its Mexican production partners, and they created authentic storytelling that resonated with local viewers, which wouldn’t have happened if a promotion from the US had been localised or translated.
This example illustrates how a global brand can adapt a flagship campaign to local tastes, while still preserving its core identity and speaking directly to regional audiences through familiar themes and characters.
Cultural relevance as a trust multiplier, not a one-off effort
One of the best things about cultural relevance is that it compounds over time when consistently done, and it forces more trust and engagement naturally. Various studies confirm that content tailored to the local context drives results, like our marketing specialists noting that creating native-language content matched to local search behavior and context will build trust far faster than direct translation could do alone.
Brands that consistently align with community values often see dramatic uplifts, like MarketFully content having a 30% higher engagement and discoverability rate when content resonates culturally and in the local language.
If 76% of shoppers say they prefer to buy products with information in their native tongue, then we can also accept that creating content that’s locally aligned gives a much better chance of converting that purely translated content.
In truth, authentic local connection is what drives loyalty and revenue, and each time a brand shows it “gets” a culture, it deepens its audiences’ trust and stands out in a crowded market.
Speaking your audience’s language is a long-term commitment
At the end of the day, global marketing is an ongoing journey rather than a one-off campaign, and cultural intelligence should be embedded into every strategy to globalise content.
What that means is, continually investing in localization, research, and diverse perspectives so your messaging stays on point as cultures around you evolve.
At MarketFully, our mission is to help brands create content that’s InMarket, InLanguage, and InCulture, which means it’s designed to resonate across the board with its local audience, because speaking your audience’s language really means immersing your brand in their world through a process of constant dialogue and adaptation. Over time, global brands that treat cultural understanding as a long-term strategy will reap lasting rewards far beyond any one campaign.
