The Blueprint for Building a Global Brand

I hope you enjoy this article picked up from Chief Marketer…

Nov 10, 2009 1:52 PM, By Marc de Swaan Arons

Marketing as a discipline has been rocked by many trends and changes in the past few decades. One of the more subtle, yet increasingly powerful, is the shift in how companies are focusing on marketing effectiveness and organizing around fewer—but more global—brands.

Just what is a global brand? Think of Unilever’s Dove. Years ago, it was known best in the U.S. not as soap, but as a beauty bar, one quarter of which was cleansing cream. Today, via its “Campaign for Real Beauty,”Dove is known around the world as brand committed to making women feel beautiful … and sells a lot of soap bars doing it. The company has dramatically improved innovation focus, its speed to market, and its ability to leverage marketing efficiencies across markets.

Leading an organization with global brands such as Unilever’s Dove, Sony Ericsson’s mobile phones or Coors Light presents a new set of challenges to the top marketers, from leadership to organizational structure. It isn’t easy to “unlock” brand value. Success requires insights, skills and competencies that many marketing leaders simply have not been trained in or exposed to. But it is possible to get it right. You need to build theultimate marketing machine.

What do you need to do to ensure your company’s global marketing effectiveness? Connect, inspire, focus, organize and build.

CONNECT: Building interdependence.
Succeeding globally requires ensuring that all players share a common understanding of the market realities at both local and global levels. Connecting is about building trust and an interdependent mindset. Key local teams need to know that their market’s success is what drives the global team’s work. Global teams want to see that looking for similarities, rather than differences, is the prevailing mindset among local marketers.

Jennifer Davidson, Coors Light global marketing leader, was recently charged with bringing together the company’s first global brand team, developing the first global growth strategy, and connecting previously autonomous regional marketers. Coors Light is Molson Coors’ first brand ever to be assigned a dedicated global brand team. Her solution was to align all Molson Coors’ marketers and their ad agency counterparts behind the brand’s growth vision. The new global leadership team streamlined the number of initiatives being worked on, and institutionalized the regular updates and key performance indicators they chose to monitor.

INSPIRE: Energize passion around the brand.
Behind every successful global brand is the gem of a universal insight that both attracts consumers and also inspires all who work with the brand. Effective leaders of global brands instinctively understand the importance of igniting passion for the brand internally. These chiefs strive to ensure that the passion is nurtured, which in turn powers the brand’s growth.

Dove’s Campaign for Real Beautydid just that. Unilever’s research unearthed a stunning finding: only 2 percent of women in the world felt comfortable saying they were beautiful. Even young girls felt fat. From that insight, Silvia Lagnado, the Unilever executive responsible for building the Dove brand globally, and her team derived the importance of building women’s self-esteem, and embraced it as their mission to forge a stronger emotional bond between the Dove brand and consumers everywhere.

Lagnado successfully united and mobilized the organization around the mission by communicating smartly with a variety of tools: conferences, Web chats, newsletters and personal interactions. Rather than “sell” her vision for the brand too much, she employed what we call global marketing “servant leadership.” This combines a genuine in-depth focus on key markets and concern for addressing local marketers’ needs with very clear communication of the non-negotiable global brand direction.

FOCUS: Set global brand priorities that win big.
Vigilant focus on and commitment to an agreed-upon set of global brand priorities are crucial to the success of a global brand. The new Coors Light global leadership team has focused consolidating big marketing initiatives and developing a one-page global brand strategy that clarifies the brand vision, mission and strategy.

ORGANIZE: Clarify and enforce roles and responsibilities.
The greatest pitfall that the companies we have studied struggle with is failing to clarify roles and responsibilities early on. Defining the operating model and roles on key decisions is important; even more crucial is enforcing the model and required behaviors. When behaviors inconsistent with the new operating model are tolerated, particularly among leaders, the result is significant delay and frustration.

Over the last year, handset manufacturer Sony Ericsson has rigorously reorganized its global marketing organization to focus on accelerating growth and global marketing efficiencies. Like Sony Ericsson, many global brands are shifting innovation and communication platform development responsibilities away from local (i.e., the countries) and into global brand teams. The consistency, cost and speed arguments for this are strong.
Companies can often cut staff levels and increase the local team’s focus on market activation. Sadly, these local marketers who are arguably in the most challenging and exciting changing marketing environment (social media, new channels, etc) often receive far too little support, training and recognition for their work on the new battlefront.

BUILD: Harvesting and leveraging brand expertise
Global marketing growth and efficiencies are accelerated when the company’s marketers everywhere speak one common marketing language and quickly build on each other’s successes and mistakes. How to do that? Cultivate a community of marketing excellence within the company that enables marketers to share success and failure, and quickly adapt and apply lessons learned. Leaders must reinforce this by rewarding the right behaviors and putting the enablers in place to facilitate the required information flow and change.

Lagnado’s global Dove team worked closely with Unilever’s marketing knowledge management group to create the Dove Planet, a brand intranet that addresses all significant brand questions and provides in-depth experience, results and guidelines.

Without question, Lagnado did something right: When archrival P&G’s CMO was asked to identify the competitor he most respected, he focused on the significant global growth of Dove and the Real Beautycampaign. Her work resulted in extraordinary international growth for the brands and clearly demonstrates the importance of adopting building an optimal marketing machine, led by a global marketing CEO. Can you afford not to?

Marc de Swaan Arons is chairman of EffectiveBrands.

Only Two in Three Bowl Brands Ran Integrated Online Campaigns

I think you will enjoy this article written by Brian Quinton for PROMO Xtra:

 

Sunday night’s Super Bowl XLIII may have been one nail-biting ordeal of a football game, but it produced few real surprises in terms of the advertisers who did the best job of leveraging their expensive broadcast spots with additional online content or marketing.

 

According to Reprise Media, the search and social media subsidiary of the Interpublic Group, only about two-thirds of the brands that ran spots during Sunday’s big game bought pay-per-click search ads against either their brands or their specific products.

While 95% of advertisers were visible on the Web through organic search—that is, showing up naturally on search results pages in Google and Yahoo—just a shade more than two-thirds of those advertisers were buying search ads to make sure people found those sites.

That constitutes a missed marketing opportunity, says Peter Hershberg, managing partner at Reprise. “Advertisers spent $3 million for 30 seconds of air time plus the cost of production,” he says. “There’s an opportunity to extend the life of these assets online through search and social media. I don’t know that people are going to get your message just by watching the spot during the game.”

This year more than ever before, Super Bowl ads are being syndicated around the Web, on YouTube and on USAToday.com but also on Hulu.com and many smaller video aggregator sites. “You’ve got all those commercials out there now, and they exist on a number of Web sites, not just in one place,” Hershberg says. “I’d say that’s one of the biggest changes we’ve seen since we started doing the scorecard in 2005.”

It’s also a good reason marketers should be making sure to direct visitors to their branded site with their message, rather than handing them off to a Web site without branding—or worse, to one where they might watch that Super Bowl spot while taking in a rival’s brand message. 

According to Hershberg, the companies that did the best integrated marketing around their Super Bowl spots were predominantly Web-centric advertisers, including ETrade, CareerBuilder.com, GoDaddy.com and Cash4Gold.com, a first-time Super Bowl entrant. These companies including a clear call to action in their ads, provided value-adds in the form of extra content rewards to visitors who found them on the Web and in social networks, and helped that happen by means of paid search ads.

A large number of consumer brands failed to convert by leaving search marketing out of their integrated campaigns, Hershberg says. These included Gatorade, which used the game to reposition its sports-drink brand, and Doritos, which again ran a promotion to find a user-generated Super Bowl commercial but then failed to run paid search campaign helping people find it on the Web.

“That was especially tough because the Doritos commercial was hidden online behind a vanity domain, www.snackstrongproductions.com, which had nothing to do with the brand and no way for people to find it,” Hershberg says.  

And some of the brands running ads in Sunday’s game barely got up off the Astroturf in terms of leading viewers smoothly from the TV screen to the monitor screen. Hershberg cites Taco Bell, a handful of entertainment properties and the Denny’s restaurant chain for particularly poor execution.

“They had no paid search, and their ad had no clear call to action,” Hershberg says. “The bigger issue for them, however, was that they were completely unprepared to have people come to visit their Web site. They actually didn’t put their site live until right after the commercial aired during the game, and the Web site promptly crashed and no one was able to access it.”

“Here was a company that seemingly had their act together, but still thought they’d be able to just flip a switch during the game and suddenly accept all that traffic,” he says.

Finally, Hershberg says he was surprised by the number of beer ads that were not integrated with search marketing. Since the last super Bowl, search titan Google has loosened its former sanctions on using pay-per-click ads to drive search traffic to age-restricted alcohol sites.

Nevertheless, Hershberg points out, big-game veteran brands Budweiser, Bud Lite and Heineken did nothing to extend the visibility of their commercials with search marketing.

Free email marketing templates for download

The folks over at Lyris are offering free email blast tempates. Just simply fill out the short form to get the HTML files:

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Pamala Anderson the new face of Vivienne Westwood

I’ll always jump at the opportunity to talk about Pamala Anderson… below is a article that appeared on U Talk Marketing:

 

Pamela Anderson debuts for Westwood line

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is one of the first shots of Pamela Anderson modelling for Vivienne Westwood since she was named the face of the fashion designer’s spring/summer 2009 campaign.  

Other shots include Pammie with her legs flailing from a laundry trolley, pushed by the English designer herself in one shot, in another she poses alongside a golf buggy, flanked by Westwood and her beau Andreas Kronthaler.

Of course, there’s also the money shot, with Pam flaunting her considerable assets, as she poses on a windswept beach in a super low-cut top and micro-shorts.

The sexy campaign, shot by Juergen Teller in LA, is a welcome relief from the slew of highly-stylised, highly-preened celebrity ads we’ve seen of late, such as Katie Holmes for Miu Miu and Posh and Becks for Armani.

It was always going to be tongue in cheek. Vivienne’s designs are all about sex and the feminine form.

Coca-Cola Super Bowl Ad ‘Avatar’ to feature Elvis, boy, Ogre

With Coca-Cola experiencing a 3.5% decrease in the U.S. market during the first nine months of 2008 (source: Beverage Digest), Coke will use the Super Bowl to launch their new brand slogan “Open Happiness”.

The first in three years, Coke hopes to appeal to consumers’ longing for comfort and optimism at a time when the weakening economy is sapping soft-drink sales.

Coca-Cola Brand Slogans

As reported in the Wall Street Journal, “Print ads in the campaign are expected to make their debut next week, and new TV commercials are expected to air in coming weeks, including during the Super Bowl, these people say, though the commercials are still being finalized. One spot, called “Heist,” scheduled to run during the big game, will feature cute critters in a park absconding with people’s Cokes, they say.

The campaign grew out of a six-month initiative dubbed “Project Next,” which was spearheaded by Coke’s new chief executive, Muhtar Kent, and Joe Tripodi, the company’s global chief marketing officer. Both executives are seeking to make their mark on the 123-year-old brand.

The ads are being created by Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, Ore. Coke is currently conducting an ad review for its Sprite business and its Vitaminwater brand, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mary Kay faces challenge in rebranding a mature brand

A brand with strong market presence and high brand recognition is not something that marketers would consider a delimma if they were handed the account. But Mary Kay’s CMO Rhonda Shasteen has rightfully asked the question, “for how long?”

Rebranding a mature brand

 

In an article published by DIRECT magazine, Shasteen stated, “Most women have an awareness of Mary Kay, but often their picture is one from the past,” she says. “In the last three years my work has been focused on showing them we’re very relevant.”

Mary Kay has recently expanded their product offering to appeal to younger women and it has been paying off. The products have been a “tremendous tool to help recraft our brand,” she notes. “I think the role of product often is undervalued when it comes to reshaping a brand’s image.”

In addition, the company has begun television advertising for the first time since 1982 and have added significant interactivity to their website, offering a virtual makeover function. 

According to the article, Mary Kay is conducting an extensive research project called “What Women Want,” which explores women’s desires and attitudes in key areas of their lives.  “That’ll set our strategic platform in terms of how we interact with women over the next three to five years,” Shasteen says.

Is there a chance the brand will alienate its longtime customer base as it freshens its image?

“The good news was that we found we didn’t need to change the fundamentals of the brand — it rang true in the hearts and minds of women. We just needed to change the messaging. We’d never really focused on the brand before and thought whatever perception the consumers carried in their minds was OK. But with a mature market in a mature industry, you can’t do that, especially today.”

Though the old big pink Cadillacs are still the first thing I think of when I hear Mary Kay, I applaud Ms. Shasteen’s proactive goals for positioning the company in a way to keep up with the times! What do you think?

New York Mets’ jersey logo patch fails to impress

 

baseball branding

As a big baseball fan (go Cubbies!) I enjoyed the below article originally posted on Big League Stew blog:

Mets’ pizza patch the laughing stock of baseball uniform world

By ‘Duk

If you’re the type of person who doesn’t spend much time thinking about sleeve patches on uniforms, don’t worry. 

Neither do the Mets. 

The team recently unveiled the logo to celebrate their upcoming first season in Citi Field and to say that it’s being mocked worse than an oblivious American Idol contestant would be an understatement.

At its best, it’s being said to resemble the logo of a certain pizza company that once featured the ‘Noid. At its worst, it’s being categorized as the biggest affront to Mets fans since John Rocker’s sermon in SI. 

Here’s what UniWatch’s Paul Lukas, a lifelong Mets fan, had to say:

“Compare (anything) to this, and the Mets’ effort comes off looking like amateur hour. Or maybe amateur minute. It looks like one of those cheapo generic marks you see in commercials or movies when the producers couldn’t afford the licensing fees for the real logos.”

Though some conspiracy theorists are saying that this is the Mets way of distancing the team from CitiGroup, that isn’t the case here. MLB doesn’t allow commercial logos on uniforms, so that wouldn’t even be an issue. More likely, it’s a case of the Mets being as dull and uninspiring as their ‘08 bullpen. They could’ve held a coloring contest among preschoolers and still ended up with a better design than the one above. 

Grade your website to determine SEO traffic and page rank

SEO Website Rank Tool

I found this nifty free seo tool available called Website Grader. It is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

All you have to do is enter your URL and it will put together a nice high level report. It’s quick, easy and free. What more can you ask for! I plan to offer it to my clients.

Download Free Website Redesign eBook & Webinar

Thinking about a website redesign?  The folks over at www.hubspot.com are offering a free Free Website Redesign Kit.

The Website Redesign Kit contains a how-to video and instructional e-Book:

• Video Webinar - “Website Redesign for Marketing Results” (1 hour)
• e-Book / Whitepaper - “Doing a Website Redesign for Marketing Results” (8 pages)

Hot to get a free copy of Personal Branding magazine

A few months ago I wrote a series of posts regarding personal branding. I recently stumbled upon the work by Dan Schawbel at Personal Branding Blog.

You can request a free copy of Personal Branding Magazine by visiting here.

Personal Branding Magazine is focused on how individuals can incorporate branding into their own professional and personal development.  It explores topics such as blogging, social networking, career development, public relations, relationships, economic issues, entrepreneurship and much more.

There are 4 issues per volume each year.  Each issue is sold quarterly as a pdf document in the months of February, May, August and November.  Starting on August 1st, 2008 you can purchase a hard copy of back issues.