Global brands that last share three things. They rest on a universal consumer truth — an innately human need that needs no explanation or translation. They take a stand through purposeful positioning, meaning the brand believes something and acts on it. And they deliver a total brand experience rather than a product plus advertising. Marc de Swaan Arons and Frank van den Driest treat this as the settled half: most senior marketers already have the strategy under control.
What they do not have under control is getting that strategy into twenty-five markets. The answer offered is five drivers of global marketing effectiveness — Connect, Inspire, Focus, Organize and Build — which together describe how a marketing organization aligns itself and executes with discipline. The framing locates the failure in the organization rather than in the idea.
Key findings
- The test of a universal consumer truth is durability at scale: budget can buy five markets for five years, but not twenty-five markets for twenty-five years.
- HSBC went from a brand described as non-existent in 1999 to one valued at $8.7 billion five years later, built on the single idea of the world’s local bank.
- Purposeful positioning is a tie-breaker, not a price premium: almost nowhere will consumers pay extra for virtuous intent.
- The nearer-term return on purpose is internal, with Starbucks cited at less than half the employee turnover of Dunkin’ Donuts.
- Stef Gans, a colleague of the authors, ties the 17-month average CMO tenure to companies that are not organized around a holistic, integrated view of marketing.
The foundations of preference and price
Pricing power sits upstream of any pricing decision, in whether the brand rests on a need people recognize without explanation. Johnnie Walker appeals to progress, which derives from the universal need for success; Unilever’s Blue Band margarine, sold under a dozen names, works off the maternal instinct to nurture healthy children; Nike addresses winning. An unlimited budget can buy five markets for five years but not twenty-five markets for twenty-five years.
The asset is rarely destroyed by competitors. It is worn away by a succession of transient brand managers, each making their mark by tweaking the positioning, until several competing consumer needs sit inside one company, each defended by a team, a research project and a good deal of ego. Language is the other failure point: an agency line for a value-for-money brand, great performance without costing the Earth, was read by German colleagues as a promise of eco-friendly products rather than of low prices. HSBC is the counter-example, running the world’s local bank across eighty-one countries from 2002.
Joining brand building to measured performance
The fight here is efficiency versus effectiveness, and global leverage versus local relevance. Both are called a false choice, and the debate is far too black and white, since no CEO gets to choose between profit and growth. Economies of scale are the easy half, and clustering markets on weak criteria such as proximity to warehouses creates more problems than it solves. The hard half is the effectiveness quotient, and efficiency gains have been seen to reverse because the new global marketing organization never developed the strategy, structure and capability to sustain them.
Measurement attaches to the business plan rather than to the campaign. Muhtar Kent of Coca-Cola explains why the company’s purpose work stalled: it was not embedded in the business plan and had no metrics around it. The authors’ own diagnostic, the PulseCheck, is an internal temperature check benchmarked against best-in-class practice, used to decide where a CMO should spend time before any plan is written. Larry Bossidy, who strung together 31 consecutive quarters of earnings-per-share growth of 13 percent or greater at Honeywell, supplies the other half: execution is a leader’s most important job, not detail beneath it.
Five drivers that move the business
The five drivers are levers pulled before, during and after strategy. Connect is the level of trust between global, regional and local teams, and between marketing, sales and R&D, against a Not Invented Here instinct found almost everywhere. Inspire and Focus are opposite failure modes: Greg Welch of Spencer Stuart notes that CMOs running teams of three to four thousand people spend most of their time leading, while Focus is the corrective, setting exact goals for the year ahead and deciding how targets interconnect.
Organize covers structure, operating model and decision rights, and the model has to be enforced, since tolerated deviations produce delay and frustration. Build is the capability layer: a community of marketing excellence in which markets trade successes and failures. Unilever’s laundry business, worth more than US$2 billion, shows the sequence working. A loose confederation of over 25 wildly assorted positions, names and packaging designs was consolidated under a single Dirt is Good proposition, staged through a 2007 brand immersion summit in South Africa that included rebuilding a Cape Town school playground.
Scope and limitations
The evidence is the authors’ own Leading Global Brands study, their consulting engagements and interviews with sitting CMOs of 2010, rather than independent research.
No company can or should prioritize all five drivers at once, so the framework describes a sequence to judge case by case rather than a validated ranking.
Source
This page summarises The Global Brand CEO: Building the Ultimate Marketing Machine, by Marc de Swaan Arons, Frank van den Driest, 2010.