Technology has made it easier than ever for brands to communicate across borders. Campaigns can be translated and adapted across multiple markets faster than most marketing teams could’ve imagined only a decade ago. But the ability to reach an audience doesn’t guarantee that you understand them.
Starbucks Korea learned that lesson earlier this year when it promoted reusable tumblers called “tanks” with a “Tank Day” campaign in May. The problem wasn’t poor translation, but rather oversight. May 18th marks the anniversary of the South Korean military’s deadly suppression of the 1980 Gwangui Uprising, giving the campaign’s military associations a significance the company hadn’t anticipated.
The backlash led to protests, boycott calls, an apology, and the campaign being withdrawn. Starbucks Korea later introduced historical and social awareness training for employees.
This incident highlights a growing challenge for businesses. AI and automation can accelerate content creation and localization, but they can’t guarantee that a message will be understood as intended. As marketing becomes easier to scale, understanding the people on the receiving end becomes even more important.
A Message Can Be Accurate and Still Be Wrong
International marketing mistakes are often blamed on bad translation. The Starbucks controversy is a good example as to how the problem can be much more complicated.
There was nothing inherently wrong about the word “tank.” The problem was the meaning created when the product name, campaign concept, and date were placed together within a particular cultural and historical context. Consumers recognized an association the marketers seemingly missed.
Language always works like this. Humour, slang, imagery, dates, symbols, and even ordinary words can carry associations that change between countries and communities. Two audiences can receive the same message and understand it very differently.
Translation and localization aren’t interchangeable. Translation asks whether the language is accurate, while effective localization asks a broader question: Does this message make sense for the audience? This matters even more as businesses rely on technology to communicate across markets.
AI Makes Global Marketing Faster, Including the Mistakes
AI has removed many of the barriers to marketing internationally. Teams can translate copy, generate variations, research audiences, repurpose content, and adapt campaigns for different channels in a fraction of the time it once took. For businesses operating in multiple markets, this has been a huge win for efficiency and scale.
But automation also makes it easier to accelerate a bad assumption. Forms of communication like humour, slang, irony, and cultural references rely heavily on context, which is why AI systems struggle with them.
AI can analyze information about an audience, but cultural understanding doesn’t come from a collection of facts. Meaning is influenced by history, social norms, current events, and associations that may be obvious to someone within a culture but not to someone on the outside.
Automation can scale execution, but it shouldn’t automatically scale decisions. AI can be used to translate a campaign into 10 languages. But human judgement is still necessary to determine whether the campaign belongs in all 10 markets.
Localization Needs to Start Before Translation
If local expertise enters the process only after a campaign has been developed, much of the opportunity to prevent a problem has already passed.
Many businesses approach international marketing by developing a central campaign first and then adapting it for individual markets. This can work when the changes are primarily linguistic, but it becomes more difficult when the campaign carries associations that don’t translate culturally.
Effective localization needs to begin earlier. It can involve working with local experts, native speakers, and in-country marketing teams to adapt language, imagery, and branding around the expectations, values, and experiences of a specific audience.
We see this in our own work at Tansley. When developing campaigns for clients communicating across different markets or languages, localization isn’t simply a matter of translating copy. It means considering the audience while the strategy and messaging are still being developed, so cultural context can shape the work rather than simply being checked at the end.
Local insight can inform:
- Concept: Does the central idea make sense in this market?
- Language: Could the wording carry unintended meanings or associations?
- Creative: Could imagery, humour, symbols, or references be interpreted differently?
- Timing: Does the launch coincide with important cultural or historical events?
- Response: Is the local team empowered to raise concerns before something goes live?
The goal isn’t to make every global campaign completely different, but rather to determine what elements will travel successfully and which need to be adapted.
Local Expertise Needs More Than a Seat at the Table
Including local people in the process isn’t enough if their role is limited to simply approving a translation.
The people closest to an audience need enough influence to question the campaign. They’re the ones in the best position to recognize if a slogan isn’t clever locally, that an image carries an unintended association, or that a seemingly regular date has significance the marketing team failed to notice.
Human judgment offers something that’s difficult to automate: the ability to interpret meaning from within a culture rather than simply analyze information about it. Without it, there can be real business consequences. Starbucks Korea didn’t simply receive criticism online. The company apologized, withdrew the promotion, and later closed more than 2,000 stores early so employees could participate in historical and social awareness training.
Cultural review may add time to the marketing process, but correcting a preventable mistake after launch will require way more effort.
Human Insight Makes Technology More Valuable
The lesson here isn’t that businesses should use less technology. AI can make marketing teams more efficient, and give smaller organizations access to capabilities that once required considerably more resources. The challenge comes in knowing which decisions shouldn’t be delegated along with the work.
Technology can help produce and distribute a message. People still need to decide whether that message is appropriate and relevant to the audience receiving it.
For our team at Tansley, we believe technology is most valuable when it supports good strategy rather than substitutes for it. Understanding the audience, bringing the right perspectives into the process, and questioning assumptions before they become campaigns remain fundamentally human responsibilities. As AI makes it possible to reach more people in more places, businesses have a huge opportunity to expand their reach. The key is making sure understanding scales with it.
