Global and local: what to standardise, what to adapt, and how to decide

Every brand that crosses a border makes the same decision, usually by habit: which parts of the marketing stay the same everywhere, and which change for each market. This piece turns that habit into a procedure.

• The debate is forty years old Theodore Levitt argued in 1983 that markets were converging and that companies should sell standardised products the same way everywhere¹. Quelch and Hoff answered in 1986 that global marketing, as popularly defined, was too extreme for most managers to practise².
• The research has no universal answer A review of 36 empirical studies concluded that the right choice depends on the conditions a firm faces in a particular market at a particular time⁴.
• Language is not optional In CSA Research's 2020 survey of 8,709 consumers in 29 countries, 76% preferred to buy products with information in their own language, and 40% said they never buy from websites in other languages¹².
• Culture frameworks need care Hofstede's dimensions compare nations⁸; critics argue they are often applied to individuals, which the data do not support^9, 10.

This piece builds on consistency and adaptation, which covers distinctive brand assets and right-to-left design, and does not repeat them.

A team entering a new market, or reviewing why a global campaign underperforms in one country, has to answer four questions:

1. Which elements are fixed across markets, and who may change them?
2. Which elements are adapted, and with what evidence?
3. How is copy produced for each language: translated, transcreated or written locally?
4. What local research is needed before launch, and what can be assumed?

The answers shape the brand platform, the brief, the agency model and the budget. A global team that fixes too much pays in weak local results; one that fixes too little pays in duplicated work and a brand that means different things in different places.

Levitt's essay "The Globalization of Markets", published in the Harvard Business Review in May 1983, argued that technology was driving consumers everywhere towards the same wants, and that companies able to sell standardised products at low prices would beat those that tailored their offers country by country¹.

The reply came quickly. In 1986, John Quelch and Edward Hoff wrote that many managers feared global marketing was too extreme to be practical, and proposed deciding how far to standardise by looking at the company's overall strategy, at which products would benefit from the economies of standardisation, at cultural barriers, and at trade-offs within the marketing mix². Their contribution was to break the question into parts.

In 2001, Pankaj Ghemawat added a warning about the markets themselves: companies routinely overrate foreign markets, partly because tools such as country portfolio analysis ignore distance. His CAGE framework names four kinds of distance between countries: cultural, administrative, geographic and economic³.

The academic evidence stayed mixed. Marios Theodosiou and Leonidas Leonidou reviewed 36 empirical studies in 2003 and found results that were contradictory, which they traced partly to weak concepts and research designs; their conclusion was that whether to standardise or adapt depends on the conditions in a given market at a given time⁴. The same year, John Quelch revisited Levitt's prediction twenty years on and noted that the homogenisation he foresaw had appeared to stall⁵. In 2004, Douglas Holt, Quelch and Earl Taylor observed that companies had for years pursued global scale in production while adapting product features and selling methods to local tastes, and argued that consumers also judge global brands on what being global signals: quality, a shared global myth and social responsibility⁶.

The practical answer follows Quelch and Hoff: decide element by element². Start with distance. Before deciding what to adapt, write down how far the new market is from the home market on each of Ghemawat's four dimensions³:

The greater the distance on a dimension, the more the elements it touches need local evidence. Then sort the marketing elements. A workable default, to be tested in each market:

Two cautions. First, "global" does not mean "home market": the fixed elements should be those that work everywhere, not those the headquarters is used to. Second, the fixed list should be short. The more you fix, the more often a local team must ask permission, and the slower every campaign becomes. How to organise those approvals is covered in organising for IMC.

Language is the element that is never fixed, and the evidence that it matters is direct. In CSA Research's 2020 survey, fielded by Kantar, 76% of online shoppers preferred product information in their own language, 40% never bought from sites in other languages, and 65% preferred content in their own language even if it was of poor quality¹².

Three ways of producing copy cover most needs. The terms are used loosely in the industry; these are our working definitions.

• Translation renders the meaning of a source text accurately in another language. ISO 17100:2015 sets requirements for the core processes, resources and other aspects of a quality translation service, including a second linguist's revision¹³. ISO lists the 2015 edition as reviewed and confirmed in 2020, and a second edition is registered as a new project that will replace it¹⁴. Using raw machine output with post-editing is outside the scope of ISO 17100, and is covered by ISO 18587:2017 on post-editing machine translation output^13, 15.
• Localisation adapts a translated text and its surroundings to the market: units, dates, currencies, forms, legal mentions and layout.
• Transcreation rewrites persuasive copy from the brief rather than from the source text, so that it does in the new language what the original does in its own. It is closer to copywriting than to translation, and it is briefed and approved like copywriting.

As of 2026, machine and AI translation are fast and cheap, which moves the decision rather than removing it: the question is which texts may go out after machine translation and review, and which need a writer.

Culture is the first CAGE dimension, and the most tempting to summarise in a score. Geert Hofstede's Culture's Consequences, whose second edition (SAGE, 2001) compared values in more than 50 countries, describes national culture as mental programmes formed in childhood and set out five dimensions: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism versus collectivism, masculinity versus femininity, and long-term versus short-term orientation⁸. Marieke de Mooij applies the Hofstede model and other cultural models to every aspect of marketing communications, and argues that value paradoxes within cultures are central to communicating across them⁷.

The critics matter as much as the model. In 2002, Human Relations published Brendan McSweeney's critique, which rejected the model's claim to have captured whole national cultures and questioned national culture as a systematic cause of behaviour; responses in the same journal took the debate forward⁹. Paul Brewer and Sunil Venaik argued in 2014 that the Hofstede and GLOBE models are often misapplied through an ecological fallacy: scores that describe nations are read as if they described the individuals in them¹⁰. Michael Minkov and Hofstede, for their part, defended national culture as a meaningful concept in 2012¹¹.

For a marketer, the reasonable use sits between these positions:

• Use frameworks to form questions, not to write copy. A high uncertainty-avoidance score suggests asking whether proof, guarantees and detail matter more in this market; it does not answer that question.
• Never apply a country score to a segment. Within one country, segments differ more than the averages suggest¹⁰. Segment first, as in segmentation, targeting and positioning.
• Check category before culture. Some differences that look cultural come from the category, the price level or the channel⁴.

Illustrative, with no real data. A mid-sized maker of household cleaning products, selling in France, plans to enter Morocco and Saudi Arabia.

• CAGE check The team records cultural distance (Arabic and French in Morocco, Arabic and English in Saudi Arabia), administrative distance (different regulators and advertising rules), geographic distance (shipping and climate) and economic distance (different price points and retail channels).
• Fixed list The proposition ("cleans in one pass"), the logo, the colour system and the pack shape stay global.
• Adapted Pack sizes and price points by market; proof points from local tests; casting and settings; the media mix.
• Copy Pack instructions and safety text are translated and revised by a second linguist; the campaign line is transcreated in Arabic and French from the brief; one social series is written locally for each market.
• Research Before launch the team tests the transcreated lines with category buyers in each market rather than relying on a culture score.

• Fixing the home market's habits A global template that is really the headquarters' local campaign.
• Translating the slogan Persuasive lines translated word for word usually lose what made them work.
• Reading a country score as a customer profile The ecological fallacy, in a slide¹⁰.
• Ignoring distance Treating a market as attractive because it is large, without weighing how far it is on the four CAGE dimensions³.
• Machine translation without review on texts that carry legal or safety weight.

Then use the Toolkit: the brand platform canvas to write the fixed list, the creative brief template to brief transcreation, and the launch checklist for the market launch. The market entry hub gathers the related tools and platforms. For specific regions, read marketing in the Gulf and MENA, marketing in Africa and marketing in Asia-Pacific.

• Theodore Levitt, "The Globalization of Markets", Harvard Business Review, 1983¹; John Quelch and Edward Hoff, "Customizing Global Marketing", 1986².
• Pankaj Ghemawat, "Distance Still Matters", 2001³; Holt, Quelch and Taylor, "How Global Brands Compete", 2004⁶.
• Theodosiou and Leonidou's review in International Business Review⁴; Marieke de Mooij, Global Marketing and Advertising⁷.
• Geert Hofstede, Culture's Consequences⁸, with the critiques and replies^{9, 10, 11}.
• CSA Research, Can't Read, Won't Buy¹²; ISO 17100 and ISO 18587^13, 15.
• On IMC Report: consistency and adaptation, how brands grow and the glossary entry for distinctive brand assets.