Cultural competence for multicultural campaigns: a field guide
How to tell whether your team is culturally competent enough to run a campaign for CALD audiences, and where competent teams still go wrong.
Read the field guideLEXIGO homeThe Authenticity Advantage · LEXIGO Books
Multicultural marketing in Australia · Native Experience (NX) Marketing
The Authenticity Advantage
How to Move Beyond Translation and Connect with Your Audiences in Their Language and Culture
Mark SabaRevised edition, 2026 · LEXIGO Books
- Featured in Multilingual Magazine, October 2026
- Amazon #1 bestseller
- Print ISBN
- 978-0-6459997-2-3
- Ebook ISBN
- 978-0-6459997-3-0
- Licence
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Open-access web edition of the published book, also published as Native Experience Marketing. Registered with the National Library of Australia.
Praise for The Authenticity Advantage
“A must read… a roadmap for marketers who are ready to leave behind outdated models.”
Renato BeninattoMultilingual Magazine, review of Native Experience MarketingContents
Ten chapters in three phases. Each stands alone, can be assigned on its own, and closes with its own chapter citation.
About the book
A published Australian book on culturally inclusive marketing and communication for CALD audiences. Ten chapters across Think, Design and Go. The living web edition matches the revised 2026 print book; cite via the DOI.
The Authenticity Advantage is Mark Saba's book on multicultural marketing in Australia, published by LEXIGO Books and also published as Native Experience Marketing. It sets out one method across ten chapters and three phases: build communication for Australia's culturally and linguistically diverse communities the way a native speaker would have built it from the start.
What is multicultural marketing?
Multicultural marketing is communication designed for a specific language or cultural community, in that community's language, through the channels it already uses. It isn't an English campaign translated into 12 languages. 5.5 million Australians speak a language other than English at home, 22.3% of the population (ABS Census 2021), and the difference between a translated campaign and one built for them shows up directly in response rates, trust and uptake.
How does the NX method work?
Native Experience (NX) Marketing runs in three phases. Think builds cultural intelligence and the team. Design puts the community in the room before the concept is locked, through research, co-creation and inclusive creative. Go launches across the right channels and measures what the community actually did, not what the media buy reached. The six chapters in between spell out N.A.T.I.V.E: Notable, Authentic, Trusted, Inclusive, Versatile, Evolving.
Where should you start?
Read in order if you're new to the method. If you're already running campaigns, the cultural competence field guide below tells you whether your team is ready, and multicultural marketing examples in Australia shows what the method looks like delivered across health, government, legal and retail. Public sector teams will also want the CALD communications guide, which covers the same ground from the government side. When you are ready to commission the work, the buyer's guide to translation services covers what to check in a provider, and LEXIGO's multicultural communication services put the method into practice.
Keywords: multicultural marketing; CALD communication; intercultural communication; co-design; translation and localisation; cultural competence; Australia
Cite this book
Cite the DOI. It resolves to the deposited record and stays fixed whatever happens to this site. Every chapter page has a chapter citation, with a page locator for quoted passages.
Teaching with this bookSaba, M. (2026). The Authenticity Advantage: How to Move Beyond Translation and Connect with Your Audiences in Their Language and Culture (Rev. ed.). LEXIGO Books. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19120216
Cite the DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19120216
Catalogue record
- Title
- The Authenticity Advantage
- Subtitle
- How to Move Beyond Translation and Connect with Your Audiences in Their Language and Culture
- Author
- Mark Saba · ORCID 0009-0004-8513-5285
- Edition
- Revised edition, 2026
- Publisher
- LEXIGO Books, Melbourne, Australia
- Also published as
- Native Experience Marketing
- Identifiers
- Print ISBN 978-0-6459997-2-3 · Ebook ISBN 978-0-6459997-3-0 · DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19120216
- Licence
- Web edition under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
- Language
- English (Australia)
- Subjects
- multicultural marketing; CALD communication; intercultural communication; co-design; translation and localisation; cultural competence; Australia
- Registration
- National Library of Australia
About the author
Mark Saba has spent more than two decades working with Australian government departments, healthcare organisations and enterprises on how they communicate with culturally and linguistically diverse communities. He founded LEXIGO, a NAATI Endorsed language service provider, and leads its multicultural communication practice.
The Authenticity Advantage is the product of that practice: a book written from direct experience rather than academic observation, presenting frameworks tested across hundreds of real-world projects in Australia.
Beyond the book
Companion tools for the people planning and producing the work.
Put the method into practice
LEXIGO, the book’s publisher, runs NX campaigns with government, health and community teams across Australia, from research and co-creation to in-language launch.
See LEXIGO's multicultural marketing serviceP.S. For the census picture behind the introduction, the Language Map shows the languages spoken in every Australian council area.