The age of a single global reputation is over | Partner Content

Communications professionals have spent decades helping brands speak consistently across borders. The assumption was straightforward: build one strong reputation, then adapt the messaging for local markets. Today, this no longer holds.

A global brand can be admired in one market, questioned in another and barely recognised in a third - not necessarily because its business has changed, but because entirely different information worlds are shaping how it is understood.

I see this constantly in the rooms I work in, briefing executives who still assume a single reputation travels intact across borders. AI is accelerating the problem. As generative AI becomes an increasingly common starting point for research, recommendations and decision-making, brands are discovering that their reputation is no longer built from a single body of evidence. Instead, AI is surfacing the very different information worlds that have always existed across markets, making those differences impossible to ignore.

For communications leaders, this is no small change. The challenge is no longer simply ensuring messages translate across cultures. It is understanding how trust itself is interpreted across different cultural and digital worlds.

In other words, cultural awareness is no longer enough. Organisations need cultural intelligence.

Recent events illustrate why. Lululemon's attempt to celebrate Chinese culture with a yoga event on the Great Wall quickly unravelled when a ceremonial drum featured in the campaign was identified as Japanese rather than Chinese. In South Korea, Starbucks launched a promotional tumbler on the anniversary of the Gwangju Uprising, using a campaign name and slogan that unintentionally echoed one of the country's darkest historical moments. Both efforts show how easily cultural context gets overlooked - and how quickly trust evaporates when it is.

One brand, multiple reputations

I saw this laid bare in research we conducted at The Hoffman Agency, comparing how leading Chinese and Western AI models describe the same global brands.

Chinese AI models typically described Chinese companies through the lens of innovation, resilience and national achievement. Western AI models often framed those same organisations around governance, security and geopolitical questions. The opposite pattern emerged for Western brands operating in China.

The differences were not simply matters of tone or emphasis. Across 775 unique online sources cited by the AI models, fewer than eight percent appeared in both Chinese and Western AI worlds. Each system was constructing its answers from an almost entirely separate universe of evidence.

That statistic should give every communications leader pause. For years, organisations have talked about managing a global reputation. It's now doubtful such a thing exists at all.

Instead, brands increasingly operate across multiple reputational worlds, shaped by different media environments, cultural assumptions and now different AI models. Those worlds occasionally overlap, but they no longer converge into a single narrative.

This also changes how brands recover from mistakes. When Adidas suffered an AI-generated mistranslation that spread rapidly across Xiaohongshu (otherwise known as Rednote), it resisted the temptation to quietly withdraw the content. Instead, it embraced the joke, producing limited-edition T-shirts featuring the now-famous phrase. What could have become a reputational crisis became an example of cultural fluency instead. Mistakes still matter of course, but what matters more is the ability to recover from them - through honest self-reflection and cultural intelligence.

Why localisation is no longer enough

Many organisations have invested heavily in localisation. They employ local communications teams, adapt campaigns and translate content for different audiences.

These remain essential capabilities. But localisation traditionally assumes audiences begin with roughly the same understanding of a brand. That's less and less true.

When two AI systems answer the same question using almost entirely different sources, they are doing more than presenting different perspectives. They are constructing different versions of reality.

Reputation management can no longer focus solely on what a company says about itself. It must also consider the source worlds from which those reputations are being assembled. Indeed, the challenge is becoming less about translation and more about interpretation.

From cultural awareness to cultural intelligence

This is where cultural intelligence becomes strategically important.

For years, cultural awareness has largely meant recognising differences between markets and avoiding obvious mistakes. That remains necessary. It is no longer enough.

In my own training work, I define cultural intelligence as something more demanding: the ability to understand how trust is created in different contexts, recognise which aspects of a brand should remain constant, and identify where adaptation strengthens rather than weakens identity.

Pop Mart offers a compelling example. As the company expanded internationally, it stayed disciplined about what could and couldn't change. The blind-box experience, artist-led intellectual property and emotional storytelling were non-negotiable. Everything else could adapt. Local teams developed characters and experiences that resonated culturally without diluting the brand's identity. That's cultural intelligence in practice - not a different brand for every market, but the same identity, expressed differently depending on where trust needs to be earned.

Indeed, Pop Mart’s beloved Labubu has done this so well, it made it to as global a stage as this year’s FIFA World Cup.

This has implications far beyond campaign development. Communications teams increasingly occupy a unique position inside organisations, sitting at the intersection of leadership, markets and brand.

They're often the first to recognise when a decision that seems perfectly reasonable internally will be read very differently elsewhere. And they're among the few functions able to translate those external signals into language that shapes business decisions before reputational damage occurs.

This makes cultural intelligence less a communications skill than a leadership capability. The organisations that navigate global markets most successfully won't necessarily be the ones with the biggest communications budgets or the most sophisticated AI strategies. They'll be the ones that understand trust was never universal to begin with. It is earned, differently, in every market it's asked of.

Telling an organisation's story well is still the job. The harder job now - and the one which I personally believe will determine the future of our industry - is understanding how differently that story will be heard, depending on where, and through what, the world is listening.

Isabelle Demaude is head of executive training and development, APAC, The Hoffman Agency. This article is Partner Content, produced in collaboration with The Hoffman Agency.