Building Brand Trust With Global Audiences Starts With Language
Customer trust is currency, and one of the fastest ways to build it or lose it is through the words your brand uses. Eighty-seven percent of consumers are willing to pay more for products from brands they trust. But without defining what builds trust, brands still have the potential to get it wrong. While product quality and value are the defining factors of brand trust among 69% of shoppers, the same number focus on brand reputation. Companies seeking to establish brand trust in today's business environment must convey authentic communication to demonstrate to consumers why they're trustworthy.
While providing an exceptional customer experience is essential (and even expected), it's not enough to build brand trust in today's constantly changing sociopolitical climate. Modern consumers expect brands to lead by example, using their influence to propel social change. Even without taking a public stand, brands show their values and beliefs through their actions and communications. Building trust through transparent multilingual communication is especially important for global brands expanding their operations to new regions. Creating a culture of trust requires considerable time and effort under any circumstances, but language and cultural differences create additional challenges.
How Brands Build Trust With Today's Consumers
In today's sociopolitical environment, what you don't say is just as important as the messaging you choose to broadcast to your audience. Eighty-four percent of people globally prioritize sharing values with a brand before using their products, and nearly 80% of Gen Z consumers believe companies should play a role in addressing societal changes. Authenticity plays a key role here—because actions that fail to align with professed brand values lead to feelings of betrayal.
Trustworthy brands put authenticity front and center, showing their values in everything they do. This typically includes being transparent about how business operations are conducted and incorporating customer feedback into services and product updates. These brands also prioritize the customer experience at every turn, with personalized content and interactions to make customers feel seen and appreciated.
Building Trust in Global Markets With Localized Communication
Companies expanding into new regions face a greater challenge when attempting to establish trust with a new audience. Most businesses that are serious about global expansion recognize that over three-quarters of shoppers prefer to purchase products with information in their native language. However, translation alone isn't enough to build trust with an international audience. Building trust in global markets begins with respectful multilingual communication. But without in-depth knowledge about a region's culture and linguistic nuances, ensuring your communications are respectful is impossible.
Every business has heard the horror stories of inaccurate marketing translations ruining a brand's reputation in a new country. However, tone, imagery, and other nuances can have a similar effect. Marketing efforts that fail to accurately represent a region's customs or traditions can create hurtful stereotypes or confusing misunderstandings. This will undermine the audience's trust in the brand.
Localization is the practice of adapting products and content to reflect the local culture, laws, regulations, language, and dialect of a region. The process requires an in-depth understanding of consumers in a specific region and the ability to use that knowledge to develop authentic relationships with a new target audience. Thoughtful marketing campaigns that show an understanding of how your products or services align with your target audience's needs and lifestyles allow potential customers to create an emotional connection with your brand. This connection fosters brand trust, ultimately leading to customer loyalty.
Can AI-Generated Content Build Trust?
Artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant progress in producing fluent translations that accurately convey a speaker's intended meaning. AI-powered tools automate manual tasks. They allow brands to translate and localize content in a fraction of the time required for manual translation and localization. AI tools can also be used in localization to translate large quantities of text. Some even provide information to support accurate localization for specific regions. However, AI tools "learn" from the data they have access to, making them prone to mistakes. Without careful oversight, AI translation can lead to gender bias, inaccurate information, or even offensive content.
Culture shapes how people perceive and interpret the world. It informs idiomatic expressions, changes in body language, fashion, and how individuals interact with each other and businesses. Without careful consideration of an audience's culture, brands risk developing slogans or marketing materials that fail to translate effectively and either disengage or offend the target audience.
The Limits of Today’s AI
Modern AI tools excel at analyzing patterns and generating content. But they still fall short when it comes to understanding cultural context. Even under the best of circumstances, AI lacks the emotional intelligence humans possess. As a result, language models often reflect the cultural biases present in their training. For example, a model trained on data primarily derived from the U.S. will likely reflect U.S. cultural values. As a result, it may produce content that isn't accurately localized for the target region.
At its core, localization is the practice of gaining an understanding of the culture, beliefs, and traditions that shape the lifestyles of individuals in other locations, thereby forming a genuine human connection. AI-powered tools can be utilized to expedite specific aspects of the process. However, they can't replicate human empathy and contextual understanding in building brand trust. For companies seeking to build trust in diverse markets, investing in human expertise isn't just a safeguard against embarrassing errors. It's a necessity to create the experience customers expect. While the use of AI in the language industry is growing, human empathy remains the key to building brand trust in an era where consumer fatigue is prevalent.
Developing Accurately Localized Content to Build Consumer Trust
When consumer trust is at an all-time low, how you communicate can make or break your business. When shoppers are inundated with content at every turn, insincere marketing and false tactics are enough to turn them away from your brand for good. Modern customers want to interact with brands that understand them and appreciate their business. These brands build consumer trust with sincere efforts that improve the customer experience.
Understanding and respecting a region's local culture provides the knowledge to demonstrate to your audience that you genuinely care about their experience and make every effort to enhance it. This effort humanizes your business and gives new audiences a reason to trust your brand. Modern, high-quality AI language models have a place in professional translation and localization. But depending on them without a human in the loop could be a catastrophic mistake.
Getting the best possible results from AI tools in localization requires a multifaceted approach. Localization leaders can use these tools to save time and money. But effective localization also demands human empathy, understanding, and accuracy.
