The Art of Brand Localization

Annie Yau, Senior Brand Marketing Manager, Apac, Shake Shack

Annie Yau, Senior Brand Marketing Manager, Apac, Shake Shack

Setting up your brand presence in a new market means myriad opportunities and challenges. There is no one formula for all, every brand needs to create its own strategy. Brand localization involves adapting brand elements such as company value, product and creatives, which can help your brand to communicate with your customers effectively. Especially in Asia, approaching the market without localization could result in losing foothold in the market. In the past years, through helping various international brands to enter the Asian market, here are some of the insights based on my experience.

1. Know your audiences well

Before launching your business in a new market, it is important to conduct qualitative market research to understand your target audience’s behaviors like motivation, values and expectations.So many brands are trying to replicate success from their home country, but they forget target audiences’ behavior and expectations vary across markets. Based on these market insights,brandscan craft localized brand positioning, pricing strategy, and market segmentation. Instead of launching your brand with full resources, you can do a test run to get real feedback from your potential customers.

For example, before our brand officially opens in the Bahamas, the team ran a pop-up to boost the hype, learn our guests’ menu preferences and strategize the menu pricing. There is no better way to know your audience than doing a test run in the market.

2. Safeguard your brand positioning

Finding a balance between localization and safeguarding your brand essence is not easy, and the scale changes periodically based on market needs. There are quite a few international brands, especially in the F&B industry, rushing to localize almost everything - supply chain, culinary bench, brand creatives and hospitality ended up losing a foothold and failed to make a profit when they first entered a new market. However, they overlooked the reason why your audiences are excited about your market entry is how your brand advocates unique experiences and value. Since we first launched our product in Korea in 2016, there is no massive localization on flavor, supply chain, and brand messaging as throughout different menu testing, our Korean guests indeed are very excited about what western flavor our brand can bring to the market. Therefore, if you can find a perfect balance between these two elements, your brand can grow extensively locally.

Finding a Balance Between Localization And Safeguarding Your Brand Essence Is Not Easy, And The Scale Changes Periodically Based On Market Needs

3. Reach your audiences with the right channel

In Asia, user behaviors vary massively across the region, especially post covid. If you fail to market your brand at the right channel, it will eventually lead to business failure. Since covid, we notice our guests become more focused on digitalization and conveniences. To align with market needs, we start introducing digital order platforms like launching our loyalty program on WeChat and enhancing our mobile ordering system in Hong Kong and the Philippines. In 6 months’ time, we drove millions of registrations and higher order frequency. Besides, the delivery app becomes one of the key revenue drive in our business, instead of investing marketing budget in traditional Google SEO/SEM, we shifted part of the budget to delivery app to drive direct sales and engagement.