Mirela
We’ve talked so much about localizing your software with all that it implies, including localizing your marketing and SEO, but we realized there’s something so obvious we’ve missed. Your company name! That’s the first thing a potential customer hears when you enter a new market. It can open doors or disappear into noise.
You’ll want to treat the decision to adapt that name like product design: test, measure, iterate. Below is a practical playbook you can use to decide whether to localize your company name, how far to change it, and how to roll the change out across various systems.
Decide whether you even need to touch the name
First off, you should know that it’s often not necessary to make any changes to your brand name. In order to reach a conclusion, you should ask yourself a few questions:
- Do people struggle to pronounce the name?
- Does the name mean something offensive, sexual, political, or trivial in the local language?
- Does the writing system differ?
- Does your brand already have noticeable recognition in-market?
- Are there legal or regulatory naming constraints?
- Can you get matching digital assets (domain, handles) with acceptable hygiene?
If you answer “yes” to pronunciation problems, negative meaning, script mismatch, legal blocking, or digital impossibility, you do have to give it a serious thought . If it’s mostly a convenience issue, you can often keep the original and add supporting localizations (like a short local name for friendly use).
Four common strategies to localize a company name
Choose one or mix them up.
Keep the name unchanged
Sometimes the smartest move is to do nothing at all. If your company already enjoys recognition or if the name is short, clean, and easy to say, why not stick with it and reinforce your global identity? This strategy works particularly well when your goal is to project consistency and prestige. Like luxury brands, for example.
The upside is obvious: you have one name to protect legally, one name to teach customers, and one identity across all touchpoints. But the risks are real too, because if a name is difficult to pronounce locally, it may sabotage word-of-mouth. Plus, one that looks foreign can make you feel distant or aloof. If you take this path, you’ll have to help people learn the pronunciation and spelling.
Transliterate the sound
When your brand name doesn’t really have a meaning but it sounds pretty good, you can go the transliteration route. What you need to do is match the original pronunciation into the target script. It’s the go-to strategy when your markets use writing systems like Cyrillic, Arabic, or Chinese.
Thanks to this strategy, you get to maintain sound identity, something very important for advertising and word-of-mouth. But it’s also a bit challenging because phonetics rarely match across languages. You’ll need to make judgment calls. To do this right, you’ll need a linguist to standardize a version and enforce it consistently across all channels.
Adapt or rename
Here comes the boldest strategy: giving your company a new name for a specific market. You’ll take this route if the original name is impossible to use. Maybe it’s offensive, maybe it’s legally blocked, maybe it simply doesn’t work in the local script. You may also choose this path if you want to partner with a local powerhouse or create a brand architecture that feels native.
This strategy gives you the freedom to build from scratch. You can craft a name that plays beautifully with the local language and wins attention fast. The tradeoff is complexity. You now manage multiple brands, with all the added cost and the risk that your local identity outgrows the global one. It’s not uncommon for a local name to become a household staple while the parent brand remains invisible in that market. It’s up to you to decide if you’d be okay with that.
Final thoughts
More often than not, there’s no need to localize a company name for every market. But if, for any of the reasons we listed above, have to change your brand name, then choose a process, automate the tests you can (search, domain checks), and reserve human judgment for nuance (cultural risk, legal gray areas). When you do change the name, you should treat the launch like a product release: version it, measure adoption, and iterate.