Do You Know Your Audience? Localization and Why You Shouldn't Sell Fluff In Germany

German shoppers do not want to feel anything. They want dimensions, materials, and specs. If your listing tells them to "pamper themselves" with a "luscious" body lotion, they will scroll right past it. That is the blunt lesson Jana Krekic, CEO of YLT Translations, shared with host Michael Maher, and it explains why so many US brands stall out the moment they expand overseas.

Krekic has spent the last decade helping sellers move onto international marketplaces, mostly Amazon, and she has seen the same mistake over and over: brands assume a good translation is the same thing as a good localization. It is not. A translated sentence can be grammatically perfect and still fail completely, because the words are right but the psychology is wrong.

Fluff Does Not Travel

American copy leans on emotion. Feel amazing. Treat yourself. Enjoy the glow. Krekic explained that this style backfires in Germany, where buyers want facts, not persuasion. A coffee glass pitched in the US as reminding you of grandma's fireplace becomes, in German, a simple statement that the glass is thermally isolated and will not burn your fingers. No nostalgia, no metaphor, just what the product does.

"Don't tell me that your product is like the best ever, and that you will be amazed by these amazing features and stuff like that, you know, like don't push clients into buying the product, they'll just get to you know, they're just gonna, you know, scare them away."

— Jana Krekic, CEO at YLT Translations

Michael Maher summed up the mindset shift plainly: dimensions, settings, and specifications win in Germany, where the same category of product might sell on emotion in the US. The target customer has not changed. The language you use to reach them has to.

What Works in Japan Will Not Work in Italy

Krekic pointed out that bestsellers rarely transfer between markets, and Japan is the clearest example. A martial arts protective cup covered in cartoon characters was a massive hit there and would go nowhere in the US or Europe. Meanwhile, keyword strategy in Japan has to include English loanwords, Japanese phonetic renderings of those same words, and native Japanese terms, all layered into one listing, because shoppers search all three ways.

"Know your best sellers, but like don't think that your bestseller from the US is necessarily going to be bestseller in Japan because like such a specific culture."

— Jana Krekic, CEO at YLT Translations

When to Say No to a Client

Perhaps the most useful part of the conversation was about restraint. Krekic's team turned down a listing for a novelty product built around one of Germany's most sensitive historical topics, even though the client insisted there was demand. She also declined to localize face mask listings during periods of heavy regulation and confusion. Her reasoning was simple: taking the money without a real chance of success damages both the client's brand and her own reputation.

"I'd rather like be transparent and tell people if it's gonna work or not, they just take their money, and then they don't see any results. Like that's the worst thing that can happen."

— Jana Krekic, CEO at YLT Translations

Maher connected this to his own agency philosophy: turning down poor-fit work protects the track record that actually earns referrals. Chasing every dollar available in a new market erodes the trust that makes expansion worth doing in the first place.

Culture Fails Cost More Than Bad Copy

The two also traded stories of global brands getting culture wrong at scale. Dolce & Gabbana ran an ad showing a woman eating pizza with chopsticks and triggered a boycott across China. Starbucks tried to plant thousands of stores in Australia without accounting for a coffee culture closer to Italy's espresso tradition than to American drip coffee, and it flopped. Amazon itself eventually retreated from the Chinese marketplace, unable to out-localize domestic platforms like Tmall and Taobao that understood the culture natively. None of these were translation failures. They were localization failures, made by teams that never asked a local person if the idea would land.

What This Means for Brands

• Strip emotional language from listings headed to markets like Germany and replace it with specs, dimensions, and plain functional claims.
• Research keyword behavior per country. Japan alone can require English, transliterated English, and native-language keywords in the same listing.
• Ask native speakers or focus groups before launching in a new country, especially for anything humor-based, gendered, or culturally loaded.
• Be willing to turn down a market or a product if your team does not believe it will resonate. It protects both your client relationship and your reputation.
• Remember that a strong domestic bestseller is not a guarantee of international success. Treat every new market as its own test.

Localization is not a line item you check off before international launch. It is an ongoing discipline of listening to how a country actually talks, buys, and thinks. Watch the full conversation between Michael Maher and Jana Krekic for more real examples of what works, and what very much does not, market by market.