Increasing Marketing Effectiveness in Today's Global Economy

Take a look at current trends, and you’ll see why global
marketing leaders have one of the most difficult jobs going
today. That’s because marketing – the way companies create
customers and enable sales -- is being turned on its head like
never before. Metrosexuality is in. The nuclear family is going
away. High-income groups are spending on ‘anti-luxury’, and
vice versa. Connectivity is dramatically increasing transparency
– and placing a premium on authenticity. People are being
empowered to have more choices – and having the technology
to enforce them.

To truly succeed in this brave new world, marketing leaders are
going to have to adopt a global brand CEO mindset. Because
the question is not whether to go global, but how to do so most
effectively. Yet, typical corporate structures provide them with
no control over local marketing teams who are expected to
deliver top-line growth. Uncoordinated resources and ‘secret’
regional projects go hand in hand with insufficiently resourced
global projects that strike at the heart of a brand’s global
competitiveness. The results are often increased market research
costs as global marketers find local marketing colleagues
‘checking’ that the global mix will actually deliver in their
countries. Local marketers often feel misunderstood and even
disenfranchised by global marketers, who may be perceived as
lacking understanding of the local market reality and have no
P&L accountability for actually landing initiatives in real markets.

Effective global brand CEOs are those who have succeeded in
rising above these challenges. More often than not, they have
done so by committing to a five-step process in which they
connect, inspire, focus, organise and build deep marketing
capability across the board, around the world.

Over the past seven years, EffectiveBrands’ ongoing Leading
Global Brands project has provided a fact-based foundation for
our work with global brand leaders on improving the
effectiveness of their global marketing machine. The project
includes contributions from more than 135 global brands, 1,350
global brand leaders, and a database of results from over 13,500
global marketers.

Our experience is that new global brand leaders are typically
quite comfortable developing the ‘what’ of global marketing:
insights, innovation and communication. However, we have
found that what keeps many global brand leaders awake at
night is the challenge of global leverage—the ‘how’ of global
marketing: working with local marketers on executing a single
global brand strategy, enabling global marketing team
alignment, improving speed-to-market and sharing brand
expertise across geographies.

Understanding One Another

To connect and develop crucial interdependence between global
and local teams (each of whom feel they know what’s best for the
brand), local teams must first be convinced that their market
success is what drives the global team’s work. Global teams,
meanwhile, must understand that looking for similarities rather
than differences has become the local groups’ prevailing mindset.

When Starbucks’ former VP-Marketing Karin Koonings first joined
Starbucks’ international team in 2004, she found that their local
marketers around the world were unimpressed by global efforts;
mostly because they were clueless about them. Ms Koonings’
first order of business was to connect personally with regional
and local teams to listen and determine firsthand their challenges
and opportunities. She then briefed her teams to better connect
with international markets via regular personal visits, telephone
calls and new ‘immersions’ at corporate and regional offices. After
that, connecting disparate markets was taken a step further by
promoting a virtual exchange program among employee partners.

Internal Communications

After connecting, you must inspire and energise passion around
the brand. Behind every successful global brand is the gem of a
universal insight that attracts consumers, and has the power to
inspire all who work with the brand around the world.

From the insight that only 2% of women in the world felt
comfortable saying they were beautiful, Silvia Lagnado, former
global brand VP for Dove, developed a mission to forge a stronger
emotional bond between Dove and women based on the insight
around building self-esteem – and started at the very top to focus
Dove’s global brand priorities in order to win big. She
masterminded the creation of a video clip to represent the
inspiration for the brand – and boldly played it to Unilever’s board
of directors. The film showed children while the narration talked
about their negative self-image as a result of the messages our
society transmits about beauty. But here’s the thing: The talent
featured in the film were the children of Unilever’s board members.
At the end of the showing, there wasn’t a single board member
who did not believe devoutly in the cause that Dove was about to
embark on.

Ms Lagnado went further. She dramatically reduced company’s
innovation projects globally from 400 to fewer than 20; and
consolidated five distinct regional business plans into a one-page
global strategy document.

Consolidation Is Key

Next is organising, and one thing is certain: Consensus-driven
cultures don’t work. A leader must not be afraid to enforce
alignment and then give full decision-making responsibility to
those accountable.

During her time at Dove, Ms Lagnado cancelled ineffective 30-
person global brand team meetings in favour of an empowered
Dove Board of seven senior marketers, charged with oversight of
a single global brand strategy. Starbucks brought all its regional
marketing leaders together for a two-day summit and forced
explicit agreement on who led and who followed for all key brand
decisions. More recently, PC giant Lenovo has established a global
marketing hub in India, collapsing the planning and production
of independent regional marketing initiatives into one centralised
effort emanating out of Bangalore.

But beware the hit to the motivation of local market talent when
they consequently lose some of the most enjoyable parts of their
jobs. It is crucial to impart to local employees the strategic
importance of their refocused roles, and to celebrate their
activation successes. Companies which ignore this critical change
management effort seldom taste the fruits of global marketing
effectiveness.

Sustaining Consistency

Now try to maintain all this for the long haul. Building brand
consistency, avoiding the reinvention of programmes, and
accelerating the rollout of successful brand programmes globally
are all challenges global marketers face everywhere. Achieving
these long-term goals takes global brand leadership that focuses
ample time on educating anyone who touches the brand,
harvesting learning from other countries.

Our Leading Global Brands study provides robust evidence that
companies and marketers who tenaciously prioritise these efforts
to connect, inspire, focus, organise and build global marketing
capability are well-positioned to win in the marketplace today.

You may well feel that these are seemingly straightforward
imperatives, simple to execute and lacking in strategic pizzazz.
There must be some secret sauce. Why aren’t more companies
accelerating growth by deepening their global leverage and local
relevance?

To which we simply observe that there are many Bibles in the
world… but not many Christians.