Balancing cultural relevance with global valuesReframing a storyboard for cultural and brand fit
The brief
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The business development team in an Asian market commissioned a local agency to develop a promotional video for a professional development programme targeting senior leadership, aimed at recruiting corporate professionals with demanding schedules.
The programme needed to be positioned as flexible enough to fit around a busy executive life. The agency's storyboard came in for tone-of-voice review before production.
The challenge
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The storyboard communicated "busy executive life" in a way that read as immediately familiar to the market, but it did so through a stack of gendered defaults: an explicitly male lead, a female voice reminding him of an anniversary, and a recurring device where the lead "rescued" junior staff from problems, casting leadership as hierarchical intervention.
None of this was deliberate; it was just the path of least resistance for the writers. But it sat at odds with the organization's official stance on inclusion, and a straightforward fix to rewrite it as a generic, Westernised empowerment narrative risked feeling imported rather than authentic to a local audience that does value family responsibility and seniority as part of how leadership is perceived.
The approach
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Rather than strip the emotional hook out entirely, I looked for the smallest structural change that would remove the gendered assumptions without losing what made the concept work locally.
The domestic subplot shifted from a spouse's anniversary reminder to a parent's birthday, preserving the emotional core: build your skills, still show up for the people who matter — while removing the "busy husband, tired wife" framing.
The lead character was also relabeled neutrally by letter ("A") rather than written as male, which had the side benefit of giving the production team flexibility in casting.
I applied the same logic to the workplace scenes. Instead of the lead "saving" five employees from being unable to do their jobs, each scene was rebuilt around a specific skill the programme teaches: financial modelling, business presentations, digital marketing, conflict resolution, people management. The lead actor was shown offering guidance and direction, not rescuing people who couldn't cope.
This framing also made the story do more work commercially: every scene now mapped directly to a stated skill area in the program's value proposition, rather than functioning as a comic office sketch that happened to sit next to the sales pitch. The closing line, "with the right skill sets, you can do it all, at work and in life", tied professional capability and personal responsibility together instead of treating them as competing claims on the lead's time.
Impact
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The revised storyboard was signed off by both the agency and internal stakeholders, and it became a reference point other regional submissions were checked against afterward to avoid the same gendered defaults.
The video itself was never filmed, as the agency paused operations during COVID-related disruption and the project wasn't resubmitted once things reopened. This is a case where the value was in catching a reputational and inclusivity risk upstream before it reached production, rather than in a shipped asset.