Building Brands Across Cultures. In conversation with Katherine Melchior Ray

Every global brand runs into the same wall eventually. A value that feels universal (trust, quality, cleanliness, simplicity) turns out to mean something different in every market it enters. And by the time that gap shows up, it usually is reflected as a number: a market that underperforms, a campaign that lands flat, a launch that gets quietly pulled.

That gap is the subject of this episode of The New Fluency, where DeepL's Morana Perić sits down with Katherine Melchior Ray. Her career has spanned five industries and four cultures, with marketing leadership roles at Louis Vuitton, Shiseido, Hyatt and Babbel. All her work brought her to the insight at the heart of her book, Brand Global, Adapt Local: brand values may be universal, but how they're expressed is overwhelmingly local.

Claim free copy of the book "Brand Global, Adapt Local" - courtesy of DeepL

"We're all human and we have to remember this. We all want value. We need to feel trust. But what that means really does change across culture," she said. "Trust is universal, but it's not transferable. You have to build it in each market according to that market's expressions of trust."

Her clearest illustration is Airbnb's market entry to China. The obstacles weren't logistical. They were about meaning. Travellers didn't trust that the listing photos reflected reality. These differences are sharpest, she argues, between cultures that look alike on the surface.

The proximity bias trap

Japan and France are both hierarchical and both devoted to style and craft, yet they communicate in nearly opposite ways. Something she calls "proximity bias", the assumption that similar-looking cultures will behave the same. Waiting on print advertising while running marketing for Louis Vuitton in Japan, she found her head of advertising hadn't chased Paris in three weeks, because asking again would have been rude.

"Anyone who's worked with the French knows that the first time you ask them for something, often they don't even hear it," Katherine said. "There's even a word for the follow-up, redemander".

In Japan, asking twice implies the other person failed to take responsibility. In France, asking once means you haven't really asked.

The divide runs deeper than etiquette: Japan and France are high-context, relationship-first cultures, while the US sits at the transactional extreme, wanting to get straight to business. Neither instinct is wrong, but mistaking one for the other reads as rudeness long before anyone questions the actual work.

This is precisely the terrain where AI hits its limit

AI is good at moving words between languages; the meaning is a different problem.

"The key is to use cultural intelligence, which is ultimately a human skill, to help manage AI for the betterment of both," Katherine said. "AI is fantastic at translating words, but it can't read non-verbal communication. And it can't necessarily read meaning across one context or another. Culture is that context."

That makes the human role more important in the AI era, not less. Katherine frames it as guardianship.

"Your number one job is to protect the brand, and that involves establishing guardrails for how you use AI," she said."

The danger she names is content slop: dropping machines between the brand and the customer until everything sounds like everyone else, eroding equity built over years.

Watch the full episode!

There's far more in the full conversation than we could fit here. Katherine and Morana dig into brand strategy, the art of balancing data with instinct, proximity bias, and how to lead culturally intelligent teams in an AI-first world. Watch the full episode of The New Fluency with Katherine Melchior Ray on YouTube.

Want to hear more? Catch all of Season 1 of The New Fluency on our YouTube. How do you localize 79 billion words a year? With Mik Szajna, Booking.com.

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