The cultural range of a customer base is regularly presented as a marketing opportunity: adapt the visuals, translate the messages, represent more profiles. These moves are sound. They simply come after a question that is almost always skipped.
Who do we address, and who do we give up?
Segmenting a customer base by culture, generation or sector assumes you have settled who you serve first. A business that has not settled that question is not segmenting: it is adding variants to a message that was already not landing.
Understanding customers’ preferences, buying behaviour and cultural references is genuine observational work. But it produces usable results only if you know what you are trying to confirm — or to disprove.
Producing more versions of a vague message does not make it clearer. It only makes it more expensive.
Adapting is not translating
A message that works with one audience can fall flat with another, not because of language but because of the references it draws on. Adaptation concerns what is taken as obvious: the examples cited, the figures of authority, attitudes to time or to hierarchy. It is editorial work, not translation work.
Inclusion is verified somewhere other than in campaigns
Celebrating diversity in your communications without the organisation reflecting it produces a gap the audiences concerned spot immediately. Consistency is settled in recruitment, in the make-up of teams and in internal decisions — the campaign is only the visible part.
Measuring, but measuring what
Speaking to several audiences without scattering assumes you have settled who you address, and what you turn down. That is the decision that precedes all the others.
Adapting a message before settling it amounts to paying to be ignored — which prospecting demonstrates faster than any campaign.
Analytics supply engagement, conversion, satisfaction. Those measures do not tell you whether the positioning is right: they tell you whether the message reaches its audience. Confusing the two leads to endlessly optimising a proposition that should never have been chosen.
Common questions
How do you adapt communication to audiences from different cultures?
By starting with positioning: deciding whom you address first, and whom you give up. Only then comes adaptation, which concerns the references taken for granted — examples, figures of authority, attitudes to time or hierarchy — more than language.
What is the difference between translating and adapting a message?
Translation carries over words; adaptation carries over an intention. Adapting therefore requires knowing what intention you hold. Multiplying versions of a vague message does not clarify it: it only makes it more expensive.
How do you make inclusive communication credible?
By making sure the organisation reflects what the communication displays. Consistency is decided in recruitment, team composition and internal decisions; a campaign claiming inclusion without them exposes the gap rather than closing it.