Impact report triggered in different cultures or regions is really important, says Clare Partington, marketing manager at Empower Translate. So, while machine translation, for example, is getting good, it loses the subtlety; it struggles with idioms; it misses the emotional salience thats important to both qual and even quant research. A participant might quote a local nursery rhyme in a focus group, for example. A local might pick up a lot of meaning; a foreign translator might understand the context; but a machine translation is just going to give a verbatim that lacks any meaning. If you have a quant project looking at keyword frequency, maybe thats less important; for a qual project, that might skew your insights badly. Localisation isnt just about translation services, either which is where awareness of both culture and infrastructure come back in. For example, we helped on a study looking into equipping hospital rooms, says Ruth Partington. French and German focus groups expressed some quite different views which only made sense when contextualised against the dcor and arrangement of the typical rooms in each country. Global, regional, local? Theres a political dimension to all this, too; to avoid tensions between global, regional and local teams, engagement is key. People in many markets are really not that happy to be lumped into a regional hub by global brands, much less subsumed into a global perspective, says Phillips. An insight solution across 37 countries looks brilliant to a global team. Then you come back a couple of months later and it turns out the client team in Poland had some compelling reason not to use a particular part of the methodology, or the Romanian team wants to work with a local agency it can be a battle. While some brands devolve a lot of autonomy to regional and national teams, others have stricter expectations, notes Steggals. According to Blades, some global clients havent been able to do the foundational work needed to create a broader context for local research this year. At the local level, client teams are much more focused, for obvious reasons, on short- and mediumterm changes to their own markets, says Blades. Finding value for a global project is often about talking to those locals. If you have good relations with, say, a French client, you can probe for context, you can explore what parallels might be found to other markets. How Covid-19 skews local Globalisation isnt a one-way street, with trade barriers being erected around key markets and a cultural-identity politics seeping into brand consciousness. Covid-19 restrictions have further People in many markets are focused people on their locality. really not that happy to be According to research conducted lumped into a regional hub by Dipsticks Research Group for by global brands Posterscope in September, 64%