This has been the most frustrating part of our market expansion so far. We have a really strong brand voice in Russian—irreverent, a bit edgy, speaks directly to our audience. When we started translating our messaging for the US market, it felt… corporate. Sterile. Like someone else’s brand.
I know some of this is inevitable. Language translation isn’t the same as localization. What resonates as confident in Russian can read as arrogant in English. What feels like bold humor in one market can seem inappropriate in another. I get that.
But I’m also watching our brand become something it’s not, and that bothers me more than I thought it would.
We tried one approach where we had our team translate existing messaging directly, and it was clearly wrong. So we hired a US copywriter to rewrite everything from scratch, and now the messaging works better—it lands with audiences—but it doesn’t sound like us anymore. Like, if you didn’t know these were the same brand, you wouldn’t recognize the connection.
I’ve been thinking there has to be a middle ground. Some way to preserve what makes our brand distinct while making it actually work for a US audience.
Has anyone found a way to adapt messaging across markets without losing what makes your brand actually yours? What’s the process you actually use, and more importantly, how do you know when you’ve found the right balance instead of just compromising?