The new book, Brand Global, Adapt Local: How To Build Brand Value Across Cultures, is an informative and essential guide for leaders, marketers and brand strategists navigating the complexities of global business.
The book provides strategies for building branding trust across cultures and driving sustainable growth in international markets. It’s filled with eye-opening, revealing, and entertaining narratives explaining how learning to work across explicitly different cultures helps expand the understanding of our own world.
“As the world becomes more interconnected yet culturally distinct, the ability to master cultural intelligence has become essential for brands that want to remain relevant and thrive,” explain the authors Katherine Melchior Ray and Nataly Kelly.
“If a brand wants to thrive in an international market, it needs to understand the different consumers and the nuances of the cultures in which they live. The best brands in the world do this by remaining relentlessly curious about their customers and their markets, immersing themselves in the culture and embracing new and different ways of seeing, understanding and being. First impressions matter, and unfortunately, many companies rush the process and leap straight into execution before first understanding if their strategy is right for a new local market.”
Drawing on decades of experience at global icons like Louis Vuitton, Nike, Shiseido, Hyatt, and HubSpot, the authors break down the science of adapting brands to culture to craft marketing strategies that truly connect with consumers around the world.
More specifically, they offer their veteran global branding experience to teach marketers:
How companies like Salesforce, Nestlé, Tommy Hilfiger and Goldman Sachs have successfully localized their marketing strategies to avoid costly mistakes, where 70% of global brand failures stem from cultural misalignment.
The Cultural Intelligence (CQ) framework that helps leaders anticipate consumer behaviors and collaborate effectively with global teams to adapt marketing strategies and build authentic connections ahead of the curve.
How top brands leverage cross-cultural strategies to transform deep consumer insights into products tailored to market-specific preferences, language, cultural symbolism, and storytelling.
The neuroscience of consumer trust: How brands can leverage shared values, communication, and strategic brand positioning to forge stronger relationships across markets.
The Brand Fulcrum: How brands grow to reach disparate consumers while maintaining their authenticity and cultural relevance.
Katherine Melchior Ray
The authors share these additional insights with us:
Question: For a business leader wanting to grow his/her brand globally, what are a good first few steps to take after reading your book?
The Authors: The first step is to shift your mindset: instead of thinking about scaling what works at home, start by listening to what matters in your target markets. Our book offers tools to do just that—such as the C.A.G.E. framework to analyze new market challenges, how to leverage cultural intelligence to understand local needs, and the “Freedom within a Frame” concept to manage global consistency with local relevance.
Once you've read the book,
we recommend business leaders:
Lower
the waterline: Look
beyond surface assumptions and dive into local cultural values. Talk to
employees, customers, and partners on the ground—not just in headquarters.
Audit
your brand promise: Ask whether your brand values are universal—or if they
need to be expressed differently across markets.
Build the right bridge: Establish a clear framework that gives local teams freedom within a global structure. This enables innovation without losing brand consistency.
Question:
Thinking about your global experiences, what are the largest challenges a
business leader is likely to encounter when initially building a global brand?
The Authors: One of the biggest challenges is overcoming what we call proximity bias—the assumption that what works in your home market will work everywhere. It's natural to default to what’s familiar, but it often leads to expensive missteps. Avoid becoming one of the 60% of companies that fail to generate more than 3% ROI when entering foreign markets knowing that 76% of global consumers prefer to buy products adapted to their culture.
Once you’re aware of their needs, another major challenge is building trust in a new cultural context. Trust isn’t transferable; it’s built locally, market by market. That means adapting not just your marketing but your product mix, customer experience, service standards and tone. If a global leader expects the same playbook to win across borders, they’ll miss the opportunity to connect and risk being ignored.
Question: Why is your book's 2025 release particularly timely?
The Authors: In 2025, the business landscape is more global—and more fragmented—than ever. AI is accelerating content production, personalization, and scale, but it can’t replicate cultural understanding or human trust. At the same time, we’re seeing a rise in nationalism, shifting consumer values and identities, and economic uncertainty.
Brands can’t afford to be tone-deaf. Brand Global, Adapt Local arrives at a moment when global marketing needs a reset—from cookie-cutter campaigns to culturally attuned strategies. As the world becomes more interconnected yet culturally distinct, our book gives leaders a path forward: how to build their brand on a global stage while also flexing its identity intelligently in each market. It’s not just about going global—it’s about doing it in a way that’s both scalable and deeply culturally relevant.
Question: How do brands build trust with consumers in markets where they are the outsider?
The Authors: Building trust in a new market takes time, but smart brands use a “sidecar strategy” to accelerate the process. This means forging local partnerships, alliances, and brand ambassadors to gain credibility with consumers who may not be familiar with your brand.
Many American companies assume their reputation carries weight globally, but in reality, trust must be earned one market at a time. It’s called a “halo effect.” In reality, the halo is faint, if it exists at all.
Having the right partnerships with people, brands, and organizations that consumers already trust can fast-track the process for a foreign brand. Salesforce, for example, built strong government and business partnerships in Japan to overcome skepticism toward Western companies. Airbnb took a different approach in Germany, acquiring a local competitor to establish an instant foothold. The key? Going local early. The faster a brand integrates with trusted entities, the quicker it builds credibility.
Here are Ten Lessons for Building a Global Brand in the words of the authors:
1. Master the Art of “Freedom Within a Framework”: Balance universal brand values with local market needs. The best brands set clear guide rails such as brand values and logos while empowering local innovation in services, products, channels, and messaging.
2. Cultural Intelligence (CQ) is Your Competitive Edge: Understanding how culture shapes consumer behavior helps brands capitalize on emerging trends before competitors.
3. Think Global, Win Local:
KitKat’s success in Japan with over 300 unique flavors proves that local
adaptation drives global growth and brand value.
4. Move First, Lead Markets: Pioneer new territories to set industry standards on your terms.
5. Innovation Thrives from Foreign Ideas: Leverage insights from other industries to disrupt your own. Create seasonal magic turning local celebrations into iconic brand moments.
6. Storytelling Builds Trust Across Cultures: Culture is where brands create meaning. The strongest brands craft narratives about universal values that resonate in local culture to create emotional connections and lasting bonds with their customers.
7. Balance the Brand Fulcrum: Integrate opposing themes of tradition and innovation.
8. Trust is Earned, Not Assumed: Brands offer trust, which relies on subjective values, and which is exactly why it’s so difficult to build a brand across cultures. Keep your promises, as trust takes time to build, but a moment to destroy.
9. Cultural Humility: Lead with empathy and openness to drive performance in new markets.
10. Global Success is a Series of
Local Wins: The best brands listen, observe, and iterate to meet evolving
consumer expectations in different regions.
___
Katherine Melchior Ray lectures on international marketing and leadership at UC Berkeley, Haas School of Business. With twenty-five-years spent building the world's best consumer branding across continents, she brings expertise from her time as a senior executive at Nike, Nordstrom, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Hyatt, Shiseido, and Babbel. She has guest lectured at Stanford, Wharton, Brown, and Portland State University.
She can be heard on various podcasts and blogs related to global marketing and leadership, culture and diversity, women's empowerment, and the future of work.
Nataly Kelly is Chief Marketing
Officer at Zappi, based in Boston, MA. Previously she served at HubSpot as Vice
President of Marketing, Vice President of International Operations and
Strategy, and Vice President of Localization. Kelly also served as Chief Growth
Officer and Vice President of Marketing for two other software start-ups in the
MarTech space, and previously held the role of Chief Research Officer for CSA
Research, where she oversaw the company's subscription-based market research
practice.
She is a seasoned business leader, international business expert, and
longtime Harvard Business Review contributor on topics of
global business and international marketing.
Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.
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