International Brand Consulting

Language Connect is the first UK-based translation company to offer a unique consultancy service for the localization of international brands.

The premise is simple; when expanding into new markets, companies dedicate huge budgets to planning, marketing and logistics. However, brands and marketing messages can be interpreted differently from one country to another. Even for multinational corporations, this has led to some embarrassing and costly marketing failures.

Cultural and Linguistic awareness

A lacking of which, is the biggest cause of ‘crash and burn’ suffered by a brand launch in new territory. This common mistake of brands relying on their initial hard work of developing their identity, in their original markets, can be illustrated with many big brand names.

‘Finger lickin’ good’ – no medals for identifying the owner of this slogan. Imagine the satirical perception when the Chinese were encouraged to ‘Eat your fingers off’ at the launch of KFC in Asia.
‘White Power’ – this prototype name for an Audi car was disclosed on a press release forcing an apology from the car manufacturer for the obvious racial connotation. Read more about this here.

Successful International Branding

To avoid these pitfalls we’ve designed two types of service, both utilise our vast resources of experienced linguists spread over 100 countries worldwide. The service acts as a cost-effective form of insurance for companies expanding to new overseas markets.

Standard

We send the proposed brand name, logo, slogan and any key marketing messages to 10 linguists living in the country targeted for expansion. They are then asked to analyse the meaning, perception, pronunciation and any other social, cultural or political connotations of the branding in their culture.

We then deliver a full set of answers for you to make an informed decision about the brand localization. If you have further questions following the results then the service is designed to accommodate those too.

Premium

Experience a tailored service unique to your specific requirements and objectives. With the benefits of specifying the brand target market/consumer, we are able to hand-pick a number of respondents from our pool of linguists, all specified by you, in terms of specific demographics such as age, gender and location. Along with this, your designated consultant will collaborate with you on additional questions which can be added to the analysis with specific relevance to the nature of your brand and your research requirements. We can even give you direct communication access to our linguists via a web collaboration platform and provide a summarised transcript of interviews conducted.

To get a free quote and speak to us about our international brand consulting service call us on +44 (0)207 940 8100 or +44 (0)845 094 5660, email us at info@languageconnect.net or complete our Contact Us form.