Vermeer Bulletin. The Global Brand CEO. Building global marketing capability to accelerate brand growth

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1 Leading Global Brands Vermeer Bulletin The Global Brand CEO Building global marketing capability to accelerate brand growth A Starbucks cappuccino is the same around the world, yet baristas from Singapore to Stuttgart ensure that the brand experience is an intensely personal one for local customers. Similarly, Dove s breakthrough Real Beauty campaign, which challenged traditional beauty stereotypes while showing real women in their underwear, has been a success in more than 30 countries. Despite intensifying local and global competition, Starbucks, Dove and many other leading global brands have seen sales grow steadily as a result of their ability to create one global voice and make that voice relevant to the local consumer. Over the last seven years, Vermeer has studied over 50 global brands closely and found that success is directly pegged to an important quality of the leaders of these brands: approaching work with the mindset of a Global Brand CEO. 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. People like Karin Koonings, vp of marketing at Starbucks Coffee International, and Silvia Lagnado, former global brand VP at Dove, helped create long-term success for their brands, much as a good CEO creates continuity for a successful company. So, regardless of their actual titles, companies in search of global brand growth must put in place and support the efforts of a new breed of global brand leaders, the Global Brand CEOs. GETTING GLOBAL MARKETING RIGHT Grooming Global Brand CEOs like Koonings and Lagnado is crucial, as globalization has become arguably the most important marketing priority of the 21st century. The challenge for both the organization and brand leader is that the marketing qualities that led to the global job are not what determine success in the new role....what keeps many global brand leaders awake at night is the new challenge of global leverage the HOW of global marketing. Our experience is that new global brand leaders are typically quite comfortable developing the what of global marketing: insights, innovation and communication. We found that what keeps many global brand leaders awake at night is the new challenge of global leverage the how of global marketing: developing a single global brand strategy, enabling marketing team alignment, improving speed to market and building brand expertise across geographies. 1

2 It s 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 reward for solving this equation is substantial and sustainable growth for global brands during the years that Lagnado led Dove, the brand almost doubled in global sales. GLOBAL MARKETING CHALLENGES Our experience is that the leaders of global brands often face very similar challenges as they work to increase global leverage not the least of which is the ability to protect the universal truths that define their brand broad global consumer resonance. Another significant challenge is internal alignment around the brand s mission and objectives. Interestingly, we often find that both local and global marketers are right about what will drive success for the brand, and that most disagreements can be explained by bad communication, and differences in vantage points and time horizons. Even with the brand mission and brand strategy agreed upon, there is often a lack of alignment on what priority projects will best enable the brand objectives. Uncoordinated resources and secret regional projects go hand in hand with insufficiently resourced global projects and strike at the heart of the brand s global competitiveness. The results are often subpar global innovation and increased market research costs as global marketers find local marketing colleagues checking that the global mix will actually deliver in their countries. Even more importantly, this often leads to unproductive behaviors that quickly spiral downward into a lack of willingness to focus sufficient resources on global projects. But the biggest underlying challenge to address is often a lack of real trust, and interdependence between the local and global marketing teams. Local marketers often feel misunderstood and even disenfranchised by global marketers, who may be perceived as lacking understanding of the local market reality and having no accountability for actually landing initiatives in real markets. CONNECT: Building interdependence. BUILDING GLOBAL MARKETING CAPABILITY Global Brand CEOs understand this dynamic instinctively and make it their job to evolve the organization from the traditional product, functional or geography-based orientation to one that builds sustainable growth by focusing on building the mindsets, behaviors and enablers required for success. We call this building global marketing capability. The Vermeer Global Marketing Capability ProgramTM was developed as a framework for successful global brand leadership. The Program promotes global brand success by encouraging leaders to focus on the mindsets, behaviors and enablers that accelerate global marketing effectiveness: Connect, Inspire, Focus, Organize and Build. Succeeding globally means that it is crucial 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 k and global teams want to see that looking for similarities, rather than differences, is the prevailing mindset among local teams. 2

3 When Koonings first joined Starbucks international marketing team, she found that the team s internal clients local marketers around the world were largely unimpressed by the team s previous efforts to support the markets. It was felt that the U.S.-based internal marketing team lacked understanding of what was happening outside the United States. Koonings therefore made it her first order of business to connect personally with regional and local teams to listen and determine firsthand their challenges and opportunities. She the briefed her teams to better connect with international markets via regular personal visits, telephone calls and new functional forums at corporate and in regions to offer interaction and strategic planning as often as possible. Koonings also initiated an annual online global brand benchmark: a quantitative survey reaching out to all global and local marketers to understand how better global alignment could lead to better results in market. Koonings took connecting disparate markets a step further by promoting rotational assignments among employee partners, offering them the chance to rotate to other markets. Such connection is crucially important since Starbucks, which opened its first location outside of the United States in 1996, now operates in over 40 countries and is projected to double the number of international stores within just a few years. Lagnado likewise faced massive challenges in trying to connect long-autonomous local marketing directors from each region when she became the global lead for Dove in Dove was Unilever s first brand ever to be assigned a dedicated global brand team. In the end, she initiated the successful alignment of some 600 Unilever marketers and their ad agency counterparts behind the single, focused Real Beauty strategy by creating a Dove Board, a team that included five marketers from each of the brand s key regions, and by institutionalizing the regular updates between the global and local teams with the creation of Top 10 Market Summits. INSPIRE: Energize passion around the brand. At Vermeer, we have found that behind every successful global brand is the gem of a universal insight that not only attracts consumers but also has the power to inspire all who work with the brand. Over time, these truths can become lost or hidden through too many marketers or positioning consultancies wanting to make their mark by changing something. It often takes a significant peeling-of-the-onion exercise and strong leadership focus to get back to a simple formulation that is understood in all languages and hits the universal sweet spot. Successful leaders of global brands instinctively understand the importance of energizing passion for the brand internally and go out of their way to ensure that it powers the growth of the brand. Dove s Campaign for Real Beauty did just that. Research unearthed that only 2 percent of women in the world felt comfortable saying they were beautiful, and that even young girls felt fat. From that insight, Lagnado and her team derived the importance of building women s self-esteem, seeing it as their mission to forge a stronger emotional bond between its brand and women around the world. The simple concept was a surefire hit, inspiring and rallying not just consumers but also all Dove marketers around the globe, many of whom are women or have mothers, sisters or daughters. 3

4 But it wasn t only the message. It was the way the message was communicated that helped Lagnado to mobilize the organization globally with conferences, web chats, newsletters and personal interactions. She was careful not to be perceived as selling her vision for the brand too much - instead employing what we call Global Brand Servant Leadership: combining a genuine in- depth focus on key markets and concern for addressing those local marketers needs with very clear communication of the non-negotiable global brand direction. Lagnado made it her job to elicit feedback early on and create an atmosphere where local and global marketers were both challenged and celebrated for applying their expertise and ensure successful program development and delivery. FOCUS: Set global brand priorities that win big. Vigilant focus and commitment to an agreed-upon set of global brand priorities are crucial to the success of the global brand. Inconsistency often leads to lower quality and higher costs and global initiatives lacking the boldness and quality required for success. For Dove, focusing the global brand team meant ruthlessly consolidating five regionally distinct brand plans into a one-page global brand strategy document to create clarity around its brand vision, mission and strategy. The Dove One-Pager, which has become something of a legend at Unilever, defines what everyone now working on Dove lives and breathes. Lagnado also dramatically reduced the number of innovation projects globally from 400 to fewer than 20 to ensure that adequate resourcing for success was in place. Likewise, to stay focused on the global message, Starbucks consolidated the multitude of regional initiatives into a single international promotion calendar. Developed by the international team in conjunction with regional support teams, this calendar agenda is rolled out and implemented by local marketing teams across the globe. Such continuity has helped Starbucks fulfill its brand promise of exceptional customer service and fuel its explosive international growth. ORGANIZE: Clarify and enforce roles and responsibilities....addressing local marketers needs, with a very clear communication of the non-negotiable global brand direction. The biggest pitfall that the companies we have studied struggle with is the failure to clarify roles and responsibilities early on. Many global brand organizations get stuck in a consensus-driven culture and lack the courage to give full decision-making responsibility to only those accountable. Defining the operating model and roles on key decisions is important, but enforcing the model and required behaviors is even more important. If behaviors inconsistent with the new operating model are tolerated, particularly among leaders, this will cause significant delay and frustration. When Lagnado started her job, Dove had held quarterly global brand team meetings where 30 people would get together to exchange ideas, but no decisions were made. Creating an empowered Dove Board of seven that took global responsibility for one Dove strategy was the turning point for the brand s success. This included giving global responsibilities for global decisions like advertising development to regional brand leaders. The work was divided up among the board members, but the full alignment amongst members ensured that there was just one voice on any topic. 4

5 In the case of Starbucks, Koonings brought all regional marketing leaders together for a two-day summit and facilitated explicit agreement on who was in the lead and who followed for all key brand decision-making processes. Although uncomfortable at first, the sessions created enormous transparency, trust and agreements on team behaviors moving forward. Many global brands are transitioning innovation and communication development responsibilities away from the countries and into global brand teams. The consistency, cost and speed arguments for this are strong. Such a shift allows companies to decrease local staff levels and increase the focus on local market activation. Sadly, often far too little attention is given to recognizing the crucial importance of local marketers who are driving brand growth through the brand s local activation programs. Communicating the strategic importance of the refocused local marketing activation role, driving new marketing excellence programs to increase organizational capability in this area and celebrating the successes of activation leaders will ensure that global-local transitions happen more smoothly and that key local marketing talent is retained. BUILD: Harvesting and leveraging brand expertise Maintaining brand consistency over time, avoiding the reinvention of programs, and accelerating the rollout of successful brand programs globally make up some of the biggest challenges for a Global Brand CEO. Without these, the advantages of global leverage to drive competitive advantage against local and retailer brands are quickly lost. Global success is accelerated when a brand s marketers everywhere speak one language, and are willing and equipped to quickly build on each other s successes and mistakes. This requires the cultivation of a learning mindset with marketers willing to share and listen, and can be achieved only if the brand s leaders are setting the example, turning around limiting mindsets, rewarding the right behaviors and putting the enablers in place to make it happen smoothly. Successful global brand leaders give high priority to educating anyone who touches the brand, and creating a platform for the harvesting and sharing of learning from those countries that got it right or wrong allowing marketers in other countries to quickly learn from and apply the experience. To accelerate Starbucks continued global expansion, Koonings recognized that it would be crucial to have the tools in place to maintain the consistency of marketing programs around the world. She created a marketing excellence program called The Starbucks Learning Series to build marketing skills for local marketers and create an exchange platform for practical experience. Koonings also launched a monthly Spark internal newsletter to share best practices. Similarly, the Dove Board worked very closely with the leader of Unilever marketing knowledge management to create the Dove Planet, a brand intranet that addresses all significant brand questions and shares in-depth experience, results and guidelines. 5

6 GET GOING GLOBAL Going global is no longer a choice for most brands. Globalization is happening, and the most important question for global brand leaders today has become how to leverage scale and at the same time increase local competitiveness. Lagnado must have done something right: When archrival P&G s CEO Jim Stengel, was asked to identify the competitor he most respected, he focused on the significant global growth of Dove and the Real Beauty campaign. Similarly, Starbucks international growth has pushed the company from 5,000 to over 12,000 stores worldwide in just under five years. We have been amazed by the global acceptance and visibility of our brand in all our international markets, says Howard Schultz, chairman and chief global strategist, on the company s website. We believe Lagnado and Koonings are at the head of the pack of successful global brand leaders precisely because they focus on the building of global marketing capability. Their work has resulted in extraordinary international growth for their brands and clearly demonstrates the importance of adopting the mindset of a Global Brand CEO. Can you afford not to? About Vermeer Vermeer is the only global marketing consultancy focused on unleashing purpose-led growth through the development and embedding of consumer insight-led marketing strategy, structure and capability. They provide solutions to strategic marketing challenges, rooting their approach in consumer research, stakeholder understanding and financial analysis. Vermeer s whole-brain thinking brings an intrinsically multi-lens and practical approach to their work. Beyond their cutting-edge client work, they deliver thought leadership to change the conversation in business: Their Marketing2020 study is the most global and comprehensive CMO research program in the market and was featured as the cover story of Harvard Business Review s 2014 summer issue. 6