"Localization" is probably one of the first words a European brand hears when it enters China.
Then the questions start.
How should we say it in Chinese?
Should the visual identity change?
What should we do on social?
Which KOLs should we work with?
Should the website be redesigned?
All reasonable questions.
But I increasingly think localization often comes too early.
Before you start localizing, there is a more basic question:
What exactly is the thing you're localizing?
I've seen brands enter China and start changing almost immediately.
The logo stays.
The visual identity changes.
The brand story gets rewritten.
The Chinese tagline goes through six versions.
Everything gets "localized."
And eventually, the brand looks very Chinese.
But nobody has answered the more important question:
Why should a Chinese consumer choose you?
I've always thought good localization is not about making a brand look more Chinese.
It's about helping someone from another culture understand:
Why does this brand matter to me?
Those are two very different things.
For a German brand, being German may be part of the value.
For a French brand, its history may be one of its most important assets.
A small European brand doesn't need to pretend it's a Chinese consumer brand.
If you remove everything that made it interesting in the first place, you may end up with something that looks local but has very little reason to exist.
Of course, some things need to change.
Distribution changes.
The way people discover brands changes.
Content rhythms change.
The way trust is built changes.
Sometimes even the order in which a brand tells its story needs to change.
But that's not the same as turning the brand into a Chinese brand.
I think of it more as:
translation, not rewriting.
And not language translation.
It's translating the value of the original brand into a different market context, so that it can make sense again.
That's why, when I work on cross-border brands, I often ask:
What are the things you absolutely cannot change?
Only then:
What can change?
If you reverse that order, things get messy very quickly.
The China team thinks HQ is too European.
HQ thinks China has changed too much.
Everyone starts talking about "brand consistency."
But the real problem may simply be that nobody decided what is actually the brand, and what is just the way the brand happens to express itself.
So if a European brand is just entering China, I don't usually start with:
"How are you going to localize?"
I start with:
"If you took away the language, the visuals and the channels, what is the thing that would still make a Chinese consumer choose you?"
If you can't answer that yet, you may not have a localization problem.
You may have a brand problem.
