Knowing your market

A cucumber crosses the Atlantic and becomes British. At home it is damp sandwich material, the sort of thing found curling beneath cling film. Abroad it can suggest lawns, afternoon tea and a nation apparently sustained by crustless triangles. Hendrick’s turned that difference into a garnish people noticed.

The lovely absurdity is that neither interpretation belongs to the vegetable. Meaning appears where an object collides with local associations. A colour can signal luck in one place and mourning in another. An accent sounds trustworthy, pompous, charming or ridiculous according to ears shaped somewhere else. Even “ordinary” is a regional judgement pretending to be neutral.

Literal translation barely touches this. All the words can arrive intact while the joke, status and emotional temperature vanish in customs. Proper localisation asks what feels familiar there, what feels exotic, and which unnoticed domestic detail might become valuable precisely because the new audience sees it from a distance. That discovery can run backwards too. An export market may expose an identity the home market has become too accustomed to notice. Foreign eyes sometimes find the distinctive asset sitting in the pantry.

So I am suspicious when a global brand insists on one fixed meaning everywhere. Consistency at that scale often means forcing people to ignore their own culture for the convenience of a brand manual. The cucumber will continue meaning what it likes.