Standardisation Versus Adaptation

What it is

The split in Taking a Brand Global: Psychology Across Cultures is our own summary of four studies. One found shared brand personality dimensions across Japan, the United States and Spain, with one local dimension in each. One found that memory for brand names in Chinese and English varied with whether a name was heard or read. One found colour meanings that overlap and differ across eight countries. One found that a global image was linked with perceived quality and prestige in the United States and Korea.

Erin Meyer's The Culture Map takes a compatible stance in a business setting, treating differences between cultures as differences in expectation that people can learn to read.

In effect

In practice the split becomes a brief with two columns: what the brand will hold identical and what it will test locally. The article gives four rows as examples: name, colour, personality, and global or local cues. A result that comes back different in one market is information about that market and does not undo the core.

What it does not say

The concept does not say which choice is better, and it does not rank markets or cultures. The four studies each cover a few countries, so the table is a way of organising questions, not a forecast of what any brand will find. No study cited here tested the split itself.

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