By M. Isi Eromosele

To be successful in a communicatively seamless world, marketers must create global brands: brands that continuously engage with consumers when they want, where they want and how they want, particularly through social media.

To achieve this, companies must first reconcile the gap between changed modern consumer behaviors and their mostly outdated marketing tactics. Then they will have to incorporate social marketing into their global brand-building strategies.

Today, too many marketers are beholden to the purchase funnel, an outdated model that inaccurately reflects the reality of today’s consumer purchase journey in three significant ways.

Building Global Brands

Companies must use organizational structures, processes and cultures to allocate brand-building resources globally, to create global synergies and to develop a global brand strategy that coordinates and leverages country brand strategies. 

The trend towards increased globalization has had a major impact on the branding strategies of international companies. In the past, global firms developed brands that were adapted to the needs of local markets, under a multi-domestic marketing approach. 

They now tend to favor the development of global brands that ideally have the same product, the same name and the same positioning in all markets, under a global marketing approach.

Global Brand Creation Strategies

International companies have traditionally followed two types of strategies to create their global brands.  One strategy consisted of expanding successful local brands on international markets. This strategy has been followed over decades by many multinational firms.

For example, a brand like “Evian” was first a successful local brand in France before it was expanded on a worldwide basis. Evian has now become the leading global brand in the worldwide mineral water market. This is also the case of Barilla that was initially a strong local brand in Italy and is now the successful worldwide leading pasta brand. Nivea from Beiersdorf in Germany was also first a successful local brand before becoming the European cosmetic leader. Coca-Cola is also part of this first group of brands.

The second strategy has consisted of creating global brands from the start.  These brands are launched on a worldwide basis at the same time. This is the most recent strategy adopted by certain multinationals such as Procter and Gamble. The creation of global brands such as Pringles, Swiffer or Kangoo are good examples of this strategy. 

The key advantage with this strategy is to rapidly build a world brand with the same name and positioning in every market and benefit from substantial economies of scale.  The risk is that this strategy requires massive investment on a worldwide basis without surety of a worldwide success.

The majority of existing global brands have been created following the first strategy. These brands were first strong local brands in their home country before being expanded internationally.  Only a few numbers of most recent global brands have been global as from the start.  Most global brands have therefore a country of origin. 

Building Global Marketing Capability 

Despite intensifying local and global competition, many leading global brands have seen their sales grow steadily as a result of their ability to create one global voice and make that voice relevant to the local consumer.

Success is directly pegged to an important quality of the leaders of these brands: implementing their strategy with a global mindset. Instead of just focusing on developing effective global marketing mixes for their brands, the most successful marketing leaders also focus on building a global marketing capability for their organizations.

New global brand leaders are typically quite comfortable developing three key components of global marketing: insights, innovation and communication. The new challenge they face is that of global leverage, the “how” of global marketing: developing a single global brand strategy, enabling marketing of the global leverage, enabling disparate marketing team alignment, improving speed to market and building brand expertise across multiple countries.

This is about leveraging global economies of scale and competition-mandated cost-efficiencies, satisfying consumers’ increasing demand for customized products and services and satisfying local marketing and talent needs. The rewards for solving these challenges are substantial, including sustainable growth for these global brands.

Succeeding globally means that it is crucial for global companies to ensure that all players share a common understanding of the market realities at local and global levels. 

Connecting is about building understanding, trust and interdependence. Local teams want to know that their market’s success is what drives the global team’s work and global teams want to see that looking for similarities, rather than differences, is the prevailing mindset among local teams.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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