• by April 12, 2005

By Mans Angantyr

The Internet, with its multiple layers of activity and accountability, languages and cultures, technologies and platforms, and virtually uncontrolled historically unprecedented accessibility of content, makes global brand management more complex than ever. And yet the Web presents an opportunity for marketers to reach and interact with customers around the globe in a more direct and personal manner than ever before.

Balancing global brand integrity with local cultural authenticity is the single greatest challenge facing global brands today. The Web makes it extremely easy to infuse brands with local relevancy. At the same time, the very ease with which brand content can be modified, centrally or locally by someone in a U.S. corporate headquarters or by an in-country marketer, often creates a disjointed cacophony of voices and strategic messaging across global markets. Nowhere

The Web is not only a perfect medium for targeted local brand marketing, but also the best platform from which for a CMO  to integrate and reinforce global brand identity. To meet this challenge, global branding, advertising, direct marketing, interactive, and multicultural marketing must evolve and converge intoa new discipline that provides a clear methodology, unified framework, and a rigorous process for building strong, globally viable and locally relevant brands.

Global Imperatives

Approaching the task of managing a unified site and providing sufficient diversity of content in the right cultural context demands that CMOs recognize several critical imperatives:

•       Globalization of your marketing communications on the Web is a shared, corporate-wide imperative led by the CMO.

•       Global customers demand — and expect — to be treated like first-class citizens, and all that entails in terms of language and cultural sensitivity.

•       Globalization of brand content, especially on the Web, goes far beyond translation, to exert a powerful strategic impact on brand perception and loyalty.

•       Global content is a weapon of competitive advantage — your brand will be judged not just by what it says, but how it says it.

•       The Web is the most visible and important expression of your global brand voice, and that its global proliferation requires a level of management equal to the importance of that role.

From Chaos to Profit

Given the increasing pressures of accountability in marketing, CMOs must frame their agendas within the context of return-on-investment. By bringing order to brand chaos on the Web, a CMO is well-positioned to turn new efficiencies into unprecedented global brand impact and demonstrate marketing's vital role in building sales and profits worldwide.

Chief marketing officers must embrace the notion of a unified approach to global branding online and take advantage of a new generation of rapidly growing managed marketing services to build and support their global brands online. This is a battle worth considerable political capital because it is at the heart of the brand. No other C-level executive can or will steward the brand on the Web like an effective CMO, who can achieve these critical benefits:

• ·      Consistent global brand identity.
  Globally viable branding standards, supported with adaptive design templates and dynamic image and collateral management allow marketers to easily and quickly leverage marketing resources globally across multiple channels.
• Cultural relevance across local markets.
  A globally transparent work environment, combined with unified processes, allows the CMO to empower regional marketing teams, and give them tools that cannot be afforded individually. Standardized processes allow local marketing to collaborate with a global network.
• Faster time to market. Streamlined editorial processes, a converged infrastructure for publishing marketing assets in multiple languages, and “single source; multiple views” architecture, dramatically increases the response time of the global marketing organization.
• Lowered costs. A consolidated platform reduces hosting, operations, and maintenance costs. Simplified workflow processes reduce overhead and time spent on redundant tasks across regions and disciplines. Building campaigns on a single, global platform provides a cost-effective way to stretch local budgets and provide targeted, personalized features to every user, in every language.
• Improved quality. A single set of templates with a single set of transparent rules allows local, regional, and global marketers to dynamically change content and still look as intended. Creating large product catalogs with hundreds of pages can be done at a click of a button; the templates will simply adjust pagination, headers, and layout to fit the data source.
• Greater focus on sales efforts and lead generation. The ability to generate brochures on the fly from dynamic data sources enables the sales team to customize collateral materials with personal information and preferences. These materials, reflecting a customer's unique interests, will generate higher response rates.
• ·      Better tracking and measurement of effectiveness. Reports on content usage and dependencies across regions and language provides critical insight into the state of the brand's marketing communications globally.

In short,

By managing global content, global brand marketers can establish and perfect -- a centralized system for creating global communications on the Web, in collateral materials and in advertising campaigns. The many layers of communications are synchronized for every region, culture, country, and language to achieve maximum impact and cost-efficiency. Above all, CMOs ensure that brand content is relevant to local needs and cultures, and that the brand's customers enjoy the same, consistent brand experience everywhere.

Mans Angantyr is president and chief strategy officer of Globalworks Group LLC.