How to make global marketing locally relevant

www.marketingweek.com /2015/02/26/how-to-make-global-marketing-locally-relevant/
By Mindi Chahal
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Dubbed adverts and poorly translated slogans are becoming less acceptable in global advertising, but
solving the problem of local relevance often comes down to internal organisation within brands and
their relationships with agencies.
At the Cannes Lions festival last year Sir John Hegarty, founder of advertising agency BBH, said that
global advertising does not work because people feel it isnt a part of their culture and doesnt
connect with them. He repeated those sentiments at an event hosted by Posterscope last month.
Many multinationals seem to disagree, as they are increasingly organising their marketing centrally, but
how does a global marketing organisation retain local consistency?
Matt Barwell, chief marketing officer at Britvic, believes in the global model: Consistency is best
achieved when a global brand team works with a lead strategic agency, he says. Britvic recently
launched Fruit Shoot Mini Mudder a childrens version of the Tough Mudder fitness event across
the US, UK and Ireland on the same day.
To ensure the launch was aligned across the various markets it appointed a lead strategic agency to
oversee the coordination of all the local teams. Britvic claims it worked because of a close collaboration
between various teams and because they were all working with the same assets.
Barwell says: Ideally local brand teams should be working with powerful global assets that have cross
market appeal; theyre then more likely to feel invested in activating the communications and make a
more powerful impact at a local level. (See the full Q&A here ).

Another example of restructuring towards the global model comes from Nestl. Last year the brand
wanted a faster, more consistent and more cost-effective way of getting global campaigns to customers
and decided to review its global advertising production process.
It selected marketing agency Hogarth to move to a centralised model having previously outsourced to
a series of production suppliers.
Nestl trialled this process first, putting Hogarth to work on its frozen food brand Stouffers and its
Purina pet food range, and saw assets produced by one agency made available through one portal.
The brand claims this increased efficiency and cut production costs by around 20%.
Having all assets available through a single portal, where progress can be reviewed and decisions
made on the fly, is the future of advertising, says Barry Jones, founder and chief executive officer at
Hogarth Worldwide.
Jones also believes that international campaign management has changed enormously over the last
decade because of the dominance of online and social media, which means international campaigns
can be seen across the world at any given time. No matter where its viewed on TV, on a mobile, on
a tablet, on a billboard a campaign must look and feel the same while being flexed to cater to the
nuances of each individual market, he says.
However, Britvics Barwell says global campaigns work most effectively when the local brand teams
mind-set is programmed to look for similarities across borders rather than differences.

Global agency models

Using a lead agency, or just one, for global work doesnt mean that brands are not casting the net
wider for specific global needs. For example Secret Escapes, the luxury travel flash sales website,
appointed Karmarama as its new advertising agency earlier this month as it looks to create a massmarket brand. Although creatively the brand centralises and executes work from London it uses local
agencies on the media buying side.
Other multinationals use a global framework while also allowing individual brands within their portfolios
to vary their local approaches. This is the case for Danones shopper marketing: the company, which
owns brands such as Evian, Actimel and Cow&Gate, uses agency HRG to activate its global point of
sale strategy.
The approach is to develop a concept that can be filtered down to a toolkit, with guidelines where
required, that can be supplied to global markets to activate locally. At Evian, local marketing teams take
the agency model as standard and customise it for individual trade channels.
Olivia Sanchez, global activation manager for Evian at Danone, says: The advantage that one agency
provides is that you ensure the look and feel. What the local markets provide is the context and they
ensure that its appropriate for each market.
Sanchez stresses that the root of these campaigns has to be creativity. You have to feed the creativity
from the beginning with the right insight and the right consumer information so that the outcome is
appropriate across markets, she says.
Using one agency for a specific function of the creative process can also ensure brand consistency
around the world. Last month, specialist music agency Big Sync was appointed by Unilever as the
single supplier for its music services across all of its brands in all territories, which includes licensing
music from original tracks to bespoke compositions, creative content for campaign amplification, music
search, and talent partnership deals.
Big Sync has relationships with a network of local rights owners from composers to emerging artists,

which means it can be regional as well as global. Dominic Caisley, chief executive officer at Big Sync
Music, says: Giving campaigns local relevance is one of the challenges of the job. Its not so much

Travel flash sale site Secret Escapes avoids cultural assumptions and translates the brand to make it relevant to local people

about finding global or local solutions but looking at consumer groups, target audiences and the task at
hand.
We deal with local brand teams and creative teams and give them whats required for their ads. As an
example, in India, roughly 55% of the songs in the top 20 charts are by US or European artists and
about 45% are Indian artists so we would take this information into consideration as we looked for the
right solution.
Insight is also key for Danone. Part of Sanchezs responsibility, from a global standpoint, is to ensure
the brand has the right input from local markets so the key messages are delivered, the needs of the
markets are met, and they are produced in a way so that Evian is always recognisable and consistent
to the consumer.

Localised market insight

A one size fits all approach to global advertising can be problematic due to cultural differences but one
way of feeding these differences into the creative is to have brand and agency teams on the ground
conducting research before and during the creative process.
Advertising agency 72andSunny Amsterdam works with Diageos vodka brand Smirnoff. When
Smirnoff initially asked the agency to lead a pan-African launch it admitted to not knowing anything
about local cultures or the competitive landscape, which spawned a research trip to Kenya and Nigeria
that saw staff experiencing everyday life there, including meeting local people and learning the
languages.
Stephanie Feeney, director of strategy at 72andSunny Amsterdam, says: We learned that ignorance, if
spotted early, admitted openly and treated thoughtfully, can be the best creative fuel. We mashed up
creative testing, cultural ethnography, pre-production, creative development, local market relationshipbuilding and influencer outreach; and came out the other end with an authentic creative product.

From this the brand produced The Double Side, an ad which portrays young African men turning the
ordinary into the extraordinary, for example a barbershop into a dance floor.
However, Ted Linehan, director of savoury products at United Biscuits, believes it is not practical to
conduct research in every single market (see viewpoint below).
The research will be shaped by the category, the level of development of the category within the
particular market in question and your competitive position within this. In some cases, it is reasonable
to assume that the same insights will resonate globally. However, in other cases it is important to
identify cultural clusters of countries, and then use identified insights from a country within that cluster
to make a reasonable assumption of similar responses for your target market, says Linehan.

Avoid generalising
Making cultural mistakes could be avoided by utilising local insights. Barwell at Britvic says: Brand
teams should never assume that a demographic is [homogenous] or group markets together based on
their geographic location. For example Australia is geographically close to south-east Asia but culturally
a million miles away.
Secret Escapes chief marketing officer Cian Weeresinghe also believes that brands should avoid
cultural assumptions. We are aware when we look at other markets that we might have to think about
translating the brand into something that actually means something to local people. You cant just
assume that your name will work. You cant assume that one size fits all.
Cultural sensitivities in the market can also be identified and avoided, steering any creative away from
campaigns that fail to resonate or, at worst, offend a population.
Sanchez at Danone says: Whats important in all global marketing campaigns is that you do give some
room for the local market to add the context and what works best for them, but always starting from a
big global idea. If its relevant and strong it will make sense for everyone, but you need to make sure
that the right cultural context and cultural sensitivities are taken into account when doing the local
activation of that.
Whats clear is that global campaigns and global brand-agency relationships require balance. Brands
need to be sensitive to local markets but should be wary of over-investing in understanding them,
which could lead to creative that neither offends nor excites anyone.
It is critical to understand your right to win in a given market. Usually, consumers in that market
havent been waiting with bated breath for your brand to show up. They will have established
alternatives to meet their needs within the category.
You need to have a granular understanding of what it is you need to do to achieve cut-through; for
example, how you will out-perform your competitors or how you will establish a new need that is
currently not being met by existing offerings.
You need to galvanise all the resources at your disposal, including your agency partners to deliver
against this market position.
For a global brand, this will mean fast transfer of best practice both internally and from your agency.
However, you must make sure that the local agency is empowered to amplify a proven campaign in
order to ensure it resonates locally. People need to feel that you are talking directly to them; not that
you are talking to everyone. So you need to invest in doing the necessary background to understand
how to make this happen.
Brands should use insights from the local markets they are targeting in order to inform their campaigns.
It is pretty hard to unlock a great emotional hook, and tie it back to your brand and what it offers, if you

dont have an understanding of what motivates consumers in that particular category; or what
incremental need, occasion or mood-state you can successfully target.
Dont just produce lowest common denominator category generic work. Make sure you understand
the different ways in which your brand can win in the hearts and minds of the target market, and then
marshal all the resources at your disposal against these key factors.