| Background |
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Esolis, a leading Michigan-based Asian skin care company owned by Alticor, created a line of products catering to Asian American women through exclusive, direct marketing channels, including in-language customer service, website and catalogs. In order to appeal to the diverse Asian community, Esolis decided to begin a bilingual catalog program to especially reach its various in-language audiences.
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| Issue |
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With a limited budget and facing an already underrepresented ethnic market, the client's main concern was to balance its resources and evoke effective results. There is no "one size fits all" in marketing to the diverse subsets of the Asian community, thus, in creating a bilingual catalog program, cultural sensitivity concerns related to audiences' diverse backgrounds, perceptions and values must be addressed. For example, although people from Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan speak the same language, they use many different terminologies. And contrary to what one might think, copy cannot simply be "translated."
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| Task |
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Transcreation, a cross between direct translation and creative copywriting, was adopted. Each piece was written and reviewed by a team of copywriters, from different cultural backgrounds, speaking their respective languages, all to ensure accuracy and cultural sensitivity.
Furthermore, the collateral pieces required beauty-related images that were sensitive to a multitude of marketing styles across different Asian communities. To approach this task directly would have called for photo shoots of ethnically specific models and would have consumed extensive resources. For a catalogue of merely 5-10 models this simply was not feasible. In balancing resources and driving down costs, we utilized a variety of Pan-Asian faces with a wide appeal to the various subsets within the Asian community, and all the while still retaining each audience's ethnic flavor.
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| Result |
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After distribution, the response to the collateral pieces was very positive. At the same time, with an approach focused on universality without compromising cultural sensitivity, the client saved over 30% in cost compared to the initially planned budget.
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 Click image to enlarge.
 Click image to enlarge.
A team of writers from different cultures employed a mix of creativity and cultural knowledge and sensibility to create copy that truly spoke to the target audience. Straight translation simply wasn't enough.
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Click image to enlarge.
Click image to enlarge.
