As global marketers, how can we work with international brand strategies while still ensuring local market relevance?

Thinking globally, acting locally

For global marketers, gathering together teams and finding partner resources is becoming more and more complex. Our agency’s international offerings have been considerably strengthened as a consequence of us joining Worldwide Partners, one of the world’s largest networks of independent agencies. We recently hosted a morning session in collaboration with Worldwide Partners, Coloplast and Danfoss, where we talked about marketers’ different global challenges and their operating models.

Worldwide Partners: Collaboration has never been more important

John Harris, CEO of Worldwide Partners, was the first to take the stage.

John started off by addressing a key trend we are seeing in the marketing landscape as CMOs are constantly exposed to a growing number of MarTech opportunities. In dealing with these opportunities, he emphasised the importance of simple human empathy.

"The next killer app is not technology, it's empathy. Yes, the tech is at our fingertips, but we should never forget to take the opportunities to connect with others. In the end, every business problem is a human problem."

One question, many answers 
He also talked about best practices from working with different organisational structures – from centralised to decentralised – and how Worldwide Partners enable agencies to localise global marketing strategies for their clients. In discussing pros and cons with the different operational models, John stressed that there is no right answer – and only one right question: What marketing operations model allows your organisation to effectively deliver personalised and culturally relevant marketing communication to your customer?

Along with a description of how their agency network approaches collaboration, John also shared insights from the new ‘Reshaping Global Engagement Operations' study conducted by The CMO Council in partnership with Worldwide Partners. Based on the responses of more than 350 marketing and branding responsible from all over the world, the study highlights areas of strategic focus, factors that impact goals, and the critical demands of modern customers.

For access to the study, please sign up here.

Danfoss: Key learnings from the decentralised operational model

The second speaker of the day was Mette Munk, who is Head of Group Branding, Design and Digital coms. at Danfoss.

In her presentation, she shared Danfoss aspirations and strategy, as well as discussing the global megatrends influencing the industry they operate in. 

In dealing with an operational structure, she emphasised how Danfoss needs less governance with a decentralised model. A key to success was a strong understanding of branding disciplines across all regions, which made collaboration more frequent. 

"At Danfoss we work with marketing from a collaboration perspective similar to a sharing economy. Instead of making a pool of marketing assets at Group level, we see it as more valuable to facilitate the sharing of great content across regions. We work smarter by sharing content with each other. It decreases our costs and enhances our performance"

Mette pointed out that they were still challenged by silo thinking, as the ‘sharing economy’ school of thought had not hit all content owners. However, global partners with local insights were a huge opportunity in this regard. 

Coloplast: Using value to create preference for products

The final presentation of the morning was held by Thomas Christian Bruhn, VP of Global Marketing at Coloplast, and Head of Ostomy Care Marketing Camilla Fenneberg. 

They presented their journey with the mission of making life easier for people with intimate healthcare needs, and how all new innovations are reflected in an understanding of users' medical and psychological needs. Unlike Danfoss, Coloplast has a centralised operational model so the presenters talked about their strong global marketing department. With no regional marketing offices to deal with, they work closely with 43 different subsidiaries to ensure more powerful commercial impact. 

Through his work with Coloplast as a global brand, Thomas was also able to reflect on the changing healthcare industry. For instance, the digitalisation of healthcare information is becoming more frequent while healthcare consumers have evolved, and these factors all add complexity to managing different stakeholders. "Today, our brand needs to matter for a lot more stakeholders than it did five years ago. Every stakeholder group, different as they are, is looking for value. We need to create this value for them, and we need to use the created value to fuel their preference for our products."

Thanks to speakers, clients and all the other attendees

Thanks to both the attendees and speakers who made last week's event on the challenges of maintaining global brand coherence so successful. We had some interesting discussions fuelled by perspectives from Worldwide Partners, Inc., Danfoss and Coloplast. If you would like to learn more about how we implement international marketing collaboration, read more here.