The Difference Between Localization and Culturalization
When Chui Chui Tan, founder and CEO of Beyō Global, joined Robin Ayoub on episode 253 of the Localization Fireside Chat, she made one distinction clear from the start: translating your content and culturalizing your product are two entirely different things. Localization, as she describes it, tends to stop at language, maybe extending to date formats, currency, and payment methods. Culturalization goes deeper, asking what assumptions you are making about the people you are designing for, how their history shaped their values, and whether your product actually fits the way they live. Chui Chui grew up in Malaysia, a country she describes as already a melting pot of Malay, Chinese, and Indian cultures, before spending the next two decades in the UK. That lived experience of navigating cultural friction shaped the research methodology she now applies across more than 50 markets for clients including Spotify, Bumble, Netflix, and IKEA. She coined the term culturalization because, as she puts it, even if the word is not in the dictionary, everyone immediately understands what it means.
Challenging the Assumptions Companies Carry Into New Markets
One of the most practical frameworks Chui Chui shares is what she calls the four-bucket model: facts you can back up with data, strong hypotheses you are fairly confident about, weak hypotheses that need validation, and the unknown. When she runs this as a workshop with senior leadership teams, she watches post-it notes migrate in real time from the facts bucket to the weak hypothesis bucket as executives realize they cannot actually substantiate what they thought they knew. This is the invisible cost of assumption-led expansion. She walked Robin through a telling example involving Bumble’s push into Japan, where the app’s signature mechanic of women making the first move ran directly into cultural norms around gender roles and social harmony. The answer was not to abandon the market but to understand it deeply enough to reframe the proposition. She made a similar point about a children’s luggage brand in Japan, where a salesperson was advising that there was no product-market fit because Japanese children would not want to be seen playing in airports. Chui Chui’s response was to reframe the story around independence and ownership, two values that resonate strongly in Japanese culture. The product did not need to change. The assumptions did.
Why Timing and Cultural Risk Are Inseparable
Chui Chui was direct about a pattern she sees repeatedly: companies commission cultural research far too late in the product development cycle, often after they have already built infrastructure optimized for their home market. She described a health and pregnancy app startup that did thorough research in the UK, then tried to expand to South America and elsewhere, only to discover that everything from their vocabulary to their dietary guidance to their medical framing was so deeply NHS-specific that they had to rebuild from the ground up. The cost of that rebuild dwarfed what early-stage research would have required. Her advice to anyone listening, whether a localization manager, a global product lead, or a CEO eyeing three new markets, was simple: treat cultural risk the same way you treat legal or operational risk. Companies build frameworks for regulatory exposure and financial volatility, but rarely ask what happens if their product carries the wrong cultural assumptions into a market that will reject it quietly and completely. She also touched on AI, noting that even large language models carry cultural accents, citing a fascinating example from The Economist where ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Mistral each gave culturally distinct advice on the same personal problem. AI can accelerate research, but it still flattens the nuances that matter most.
If this conversation shifted how you think about what it actually takes to grow globally, you can go deeper with the full episode right now. Watch on YouTube if you want to see the conversation unfold in real time, or Listen on Simplecast if you prefer audio on the go. Either way, Chui Chui’s frameworks are the kind you will find yourself reaching for the next time someone in a meeting says they already know enough about a market to skip the research.
Robin Ayoub 
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