Know the Spanish and LATAM markets before you spend your entry budget

In the context of multilingual brand communications, cultural assessment is mostly recommended as a key step before any creative or linguistic process. When you’re thinking of expanding to a new market, cultural assessment helps ensure your marketing strategy, product names, and branded messages positively resonate with local consumers and stay context-appropriate from a social, political, linguistic, and cultural point of view.

Cultural assessment matters because it helps avoid costly cultural misfits due to a lack of previous research and analysis of a target market’s social, political, and overall cultural context. It helps Global Brands audit and validate their product names, rebranding initiatives, and local marketing campaigns to ensure they resonate emotionally with target consumers while meeting the target market cultural standards.

A cultural assessment process often consists of key revision and validation steps, such as: auditing your message against the target market’s social, political, and historical landscape; reviewing idioms, slang, humor, wordplay, visuals, and imagery; validating that your message doesn’t read or sound rude or offensive to local consumers; ensuring your text resonates emotionally with local audiences by means of positive pop culture references; conducting focus groups, surveys or another form of in-market research to test and validate your message with a native audience.

Ideally, cultural assessment tests are performed by in-market experts that don’t just master the target language, but also understand the cultural nuances of the target market and rely on proven marketing expertise.

Brand name and product name assessments are often priced by the hour, while comprehensive marketing campaign assessments (including in-market research in the form of focus groups, surveys, or interviews) may be priced per task or per project.