What your brand says about you when you’re not in the room

There’s a particular kind of reputational damage that brands incur when they enter a new market without truly speaking the language. Not “the language” in the dictionary sense, but the language of the culture, the register, the emotional frequency that makes a buyer feel that a brand gets them. If you get that wrong, you can sound untrustworthy, cheap, or careless, and buyers file that impression away permanently.

I’ve spent a long time working with brands on the challenge of communicating across languages and cultures, and what still surprises people is just how psychological the cost of getting it wrong really is. I’m talking specifically about what happens in the brain of your potential customer in the three seconds before they decide whether to trust you or not, whether to buy from you or not.

Consumer psychology research is pretty unambiguous on this: when a brand communicates in a new market, buyers are using language and cultural cues as proxies for quality, reliability, and relevance. Brand identity has visual, emotional, and cultural dimensions that together contribute to a brand’s uniqueness in consumers’ minds. And a compelling emotional connection with consumers who share the brand’s values drives loyalty. If the language or tone of your communications doesn’t feel native to the market, that emotional connection never forms. You stay on the outside.

The research on what consumers do with this dissonance is striking. A bad reputation can destroy a brand and make its rehabilitation difficult, while brand reputation itself serves as an external signal, making buying something feel more or less risky.  

Think about what that means in practice. If your copy reads as stiff, or your tagline carries a faint whiff of having been written in another language and then passed through a machine, the consumer reads that as a signal. And the signal isn’t usually “This is a cool brand from abroad” (although, sometimes it is, more on that later), it’s “This brand hasn’t bothered.” Which is, in commercial terms, the same as saying: “We don’t really care about you.“

Roughly 76% of customers prefer to purchase a product or service from a site that offers information in their own language, and 60% of non-English shoppers rarely or never buy from English-only websites. That is a hard commercial number, and it only describes the surface layer. Underneath it is the emotional reality: people buy from people and brands they feel understood by. 

Language is the primary vehicle for that feeling.

Let’s talk about the money for a second, because it’s significant. 

When HSBC’s “Assume Nothing” campaign was mistranslated as “Do Nothing” in multiple markets, the bank spent $10 million to rebrand and repair the damage. And KFC’s “Finger Lickin’ Good” became, in one Chinese-market version, something closer to an instruction to eat your own fingers. These are famous examples precisely because the harm was so measurable and so public. 

The much more common harm, however, is invisible: the quiet attrition of customers who never converted or who never came back. They simply chose a competitor whose brand did a better job of connecting with them.

Now for the part that most brand guides never talk about, because it requires you to hold two ideas at once.

There is a well-established and genuinely fascinating strand of consumer psychology research on what is called “foreign branding“, in which the deliberate use of a foreign language or sound is a powerful strategic asset. The research shows that pronouncing or spelling a brand name in a foreign language triggers cultural stereotypes; for example, French-sounding brand names measurably increase perceptions of hedonism and luxury, even in direct product taste tests. 

It’s no surprise, then, that brands frequently employ foreign languages in their product branding and packaging to capitalise on consumers’ xenocentric tendencies. I think we can all agree that a small Italian bakery in London with a name like “Forno di Campo” feels more appetising than one called “Country Oven“. It’s also why German engineering carries connotations of precision (hello, Audi) even for buyers who have never been to Germany. The foreignness isn’t a liability; it’s actually part of the product.

The critical distinction, and this is where brands so often get it wrong, is between strategic foreignness and accidental foreignness. Strategic foreignness is chosen, controlled, and consistent. It lands as sophistication. Accidental foreignness, the kind that comes from poor translation, unadapted copy, or tone-deaf marketing, lands as incompetence. 

The practical upshot is that there is no single right answer about how “local” your brand should feel. The right answer depends on what you are selling, to whom, and what you want them to feel about you. Getting that judgment right requires real expertise in both the source and target cultures, not just a dictionary.

There’s a conversation happening in every marketing department right now about AI and translation, and I want to offer my honest take. 

AI translation tools have become genuinely impressive at producing fluent, grammatically accurate text at speed. The problem is that fluency and accuracy are the floor, not the ceiling, of what brand communications require. AI tends to “flatten” voice, so a fun and quirky Instagram caption in English might become a sterile sentence in another language, which is not just boring but actively off-brand. 

This is what I call “The AI trap”: a brand that uses machine translation without human oversight, without a tone-of-voice guide built into the process, without cultural guardrails reviewed by a native-speaking expert, risks actively communicating the wrong thing. 

There’s also a subtler risk that receives less attention. Maintaining consistency in translations across large projects, especially those involving brand messaging, can be a real challenge, since even slight variations in phrasing can affect brand voice and technical accuracy. A brand that translates its website with AI, its social content with a different tool, and its customer communications with a third system ends up with multiple “versions” of itself in the same market, each slightly different, each subtly undermining the coherence that trust depends on.

The companies that are genuinely winning internationally aren’t the ones rejecting AI, nor are they the ones giving it free rein. They’re the ones using AI to speed up workflows while letting human expertise add value where it matters, treating AI translation as a starting point rather than a finished product. 

At Comtec, we think about this in terms of two things working together: the right process and the right people.

On the process side, we work with clients to understand their brand before a single word is translated. That means getting hold of (or writing) tone-of-voice guides, glossaries of approved terminology, designing cultural adaptation frameworks for specific markets, and having a clear sense of what the brand should feel like to a new audience. That groundwork is what separates a bog-standard translation from a brand-consistent localisation.

On the people side, we combine the efficiency that machine translation with post-editing (MTPE) genuinely delivers, where a trained human linguist reviews, refines, and, where necessary, rewrites AI-generated output, with the deeper cultural intelligence that comes from working with native speakers who understand not just the language but the market. For more creative or brand-critical content, our linguists work directly with the source copy, no AI involvement at all, because it’s genuinely more time-efficient than correcting AI-produced text.

Our research shows that hybrid workflows that combine AI with machine translation post-editing can reduce translation time by up to 60% while maintaining near-human accuracy. However, the key word is “near” because, for the highest-quality work, you still need a world-class translator who is every bit as creative as whoever wrote the original source language copy.

Your brand says something about you in every market you enter, whether you’ve thought carefully about what that thing should be or not. The brands that get international expansion right are the ones that understand the psychology of how language shapes trust, and therefore make deliberate choices about how “local” or “global” they want to feel in each market. They’re almost certainly investing in human expertise (within AI-based workflows) to ensure that what they intend to communicate is actually what lands.

The ones that struggle are the ones that treat translation as a box to tick, hand it to an AI with no guardrails, and wonder why the numbers in the new market look nothing like the projections.

We’ve spent a long time helping brands navigate exactly this challenge. If you’re thinking about a market entry, a rebrand, or simply a long-overdue review of how your content reads to the people you most want to reach, we would very much love to chat.

Sophie Howe is CEO at Comtec. Comtec is a UK-based localisation agency specialising in brand-consistent translation, cultural adaptation, and human-in-the-loop AI workflows for global businesses.