Global marketing fails on relationships before it fails on strategy. Promotion into a global role is a move into isolation: the marketer leaves a market full of colleagues who understood the work and arrives at a headquarters desk surrounded by functions that find marketing tedious, expensive and inexact. Those colleagues ask why the brand is not simply harmonized everywhere, the way Apple does it. De Swaan Arons and van den Driest treat that distance as an operating problem, not a personality one.
Their frame is borrowed from Stephen Covey. Dependent markets, where the center dictates and the market complies, look restful and are the most dangerous. Independent markets, large and confident, set out to prove the global plan wrong. Interdependent markets, where learning travels both ways and pushback is taken seriously, are the ones worth building. The stage a market is in matters more than where it sits on a map.
Key findings
- No such thing as a global market exists, the authors write, and the top five markets typically carry 60 to 80 percent of a brand’s sales.
- Local marketers who only say yes are dangerous, because they stop supplying the filter that keeps a brand locally relevant.
- The markets stuck in the contrarian independent stage are usually the UK and the US when headquarters sits elsewhere, with France, Germany and Japan close behind.
- The most productive relationships are reported with Canada, Brazil, Turkey, the Netherlands and Portugal, a pattern the authors’ own database cannot confirm.
- Karin Koonings ran Starbucks marketing across a team representing 43 countries and boiled its international expansion challenges down to roughly half a dozen.
Keeping the organization close to consumers
Distance from the customer starts as distance from the people who serve the customer. The newly global marketer sits at a sterile headquarters desk: no sales colleagues dropping by, no junior marketer asking for help with a first advertising brief. Every global strategy has to carry a local reality filter inside it, and that filter begins with understanding local consumers and building strategies that recognize local truths. Without it the costs are wasted budgets, the wrong advertising in the wrong market, and customers who read the mismatch as indifference.
The instrument is the question. Aline Santos, then running OMO globally at Unilever, asked key stakeholders how her team could help them win in market, and the asking itself made a difference before any answer arrived. Pieter Nota of Beiersdorf meets the sales team as well as the marketing team on every market visit. Closeness can be audited: ask the top five marketing directors around the world what the global team is focused on now, and the gap in their answers is the finding. Marianne Schoenauer of Unilever reviews engagement and connection statistics with every SVP twice a year.
Experience as the point of difference
Starbucks is the case for experience as the differentiator, and the scale is blunt: the largest coffeehouse company in the world, more than 17,000 stores across 49 countries, over 11,000 of them in the United States. The engine is not a campaign. It is a set of clear guiding principles covering marketing, branding and operations that let employees everywhere work as one. Going global meant opening stores, delivering consistent product and service at store level, and getting the marketing teams to collaborate.
Koonings reminded colleagues that Starbucks was in the People-Business-Serving-Coffee and not the other way around, and she treated personal human connection, in stores and among marketing colleagues alike, as integral to the brand’s success. She could not simply issue instructions: much of the international business ran through joint ventures whose business cultures varied, and a good many international partners were not Starbucks employees at all. Consistency had to be won through influence, which is what the rotational assignments, the immersion sessions and the near-weekly contact with five key regional colleagues were for.
Grouping markets by similarity, not geography
There is no single global market. There is a set of key local markets, each with competitive, consumer and retail realities the center is obliged to understand. The first grouping that matters is concentration: the top five markets represent 60 to 80 percent of sales, and losing them means losing, full stop. Those five may include one or two up-and-coming markets with room to grow, and no global brand the authors know leaves China off its key markets list.
The second grouping cuts across geography, sorting markets by the stage of their relationship with the center. The third is by shared problem. Global and key local marketing heads compare the outside-in 5C environment, covering Context, Consumers, Customers, Competitors and Company, and usually find the brand’s biggest opportunities and challenges consistent across geographies. Koonings concluded that the similarities across regions were significant, and her Learning Journey program shared best practice among similar markets. Where execution still differs, it should be a conscious choice reflecting market, category or brand development stage.
Scope and limitations
The authors concede that their quantitative Leading Global Brands database cannot support the pattern they report in markets such as Canada, Brazil and Portugal.
The account dates from 2010, written in the vocabulary of countries and regions rather than audiences addressed as data across borders.
Source
This page summarises The Global Brand CEO: Building the Ultimate Marketing Machine, by Marc de Swaan Arons, Frank van den Driest, 2010.