I want to talk about something that sounds superficial but actually destroys case study effectiveness: the difference between translation and localization.
We learned this the hard way. We had a client win in LATAM that looked stunning on paper. A small DTC brand that grew 3x in 8 months through influencer partnerships. We translated the case study word-for-word, published it for US audiences, and… nothing. Crickets.
When we dug in, the problem wasn’t the translation—grammatically it was fine. The issue was that the entire framing of the story was built for a LATAM audience. We talked about relationship-building phases that took months. We emphasized the importance of working with micro-influencers who had deep community trust. We focused on how the creator and brand co-developed the strategy together.
US audiences reading the same story saw delays and inefficiency. They wanted to know: how fast did you see results? What was the attribution? How did you scale once you found what worked?
So we rewrote it. Same client, same numbers, completely different narrative. We led with the growth metric. We showed the optimization process. We highlighted the data points that showed causation. And suddenly, US marketers engaged.
But here’s what interests me—we didn’t lie about anything. Both versions were true. They just emphasized different truths based on what each market cares about.
I think a lot of teams skip this because they think localization is just about language. It’s so much more than that. It’s about understanding what “success” actually means to your audience, and building the story around that definition.
Have you run into this? Where a story that crushes in one market completely misses in another, even with perfect translation?