Lately it seems that every other marketer we speak with wants to know about marketing in emerging markets. Perhaps this isn’t too surprising as growth in developed markets has effectively come to a halt and by some accounts emerging economies are expected to account for 59% of global GDP by 2030. (Likely one more instance of a long-run trend being brought to a tipping point by the disruptions of the past three years.)

As we speak with marketers moving into emerging markets, many cite considerations such as how to organize staff to support these consumer markets or how to manage the trade-offs of having staff in disparate locations. In simple economics terms: how should they manage the “supply- side” factors”?

While examining the supply-side is important, an equally productive, but often under-usedtactic, involves analyzing “demand-side” factors—namely, what will drive customers in an emerging market to buy your product(s). Regular readers of our blogs will know that our latest research reveals that the drivers of customers’ purchase decisions are changing significantly in both B2B and B2C sectors (for those unfamiliar with this work, our B2B analysis of customer behavior here, and our B2C analysis on simplifying purchase decision here).

But, what do these findings mean for emerging markets? Read More »

It’s that time of year again, when many marketers are making the strategic choices that will carry them through the coming fiscal year. That’s right, it’s planning season. (Members: it’s not too late to register for the August 3^rd webinar, “Avoiding Pitfalls in Marketing Planning.” If you’re reading this after the 3^rd, the registration link will take you to the replay.) Inevitably, some planning discussions will result in decisions to bring a new brand to market, strengthen a brand’s current positioning, or redefine what a brand stands for.

In the highly matrixed, geographically dispersed marketing world that many of us operate in, ensuring that a brand’s positioning is consistent across a multitude of stakeholders and geographies is a significant challenge. Too often the positioning suffers from a “lost in translation” problem as it transitions from one functional owner to the next (e.g., from product development to communications) or between global and local marketing teams. As in the classic “telephone game,” multiple handoffs over time result in a fractured brand positioning that bear little resemblance to the original.

Volvo faced the same hurdle when it was looking to evolve its brand positioning to represent attributes desired by consumers: “excitement” and “desirability.” After initial attempts failed to influence consumer perceptions, Volvo realized that marketing stakeholders were unintentionally altering the brand’s positioning by overlooking important details and misinterpreting others. A more robust approach to protecting the brand’s positioning was needed.

To prevent distortion of the brand’s positioning as it made its way around the organization, the brand team at Volvo decided to introduce the following simple, but highly effective, tools to be used by all internal stakeholders at key moments in the product and communications development processes: Read More »

The one truism that seems to have weathered the downturn and on-again, off-again economic “recovery” is that the globalization of markets will continue at a steady forward pace and, therefore, so must our marketing capabilities to reach them. Just this past week, AdAge even proclaimed that a “tipping point” had been reached in the number of CMOs having a true global scope of responsibility.

Whether or not we are in fact at a watershed moment in global marketing leadership is up for debate, but most of us as marketers can agree that the decades-long trend of expanding into new markets is increasingly set against the backdrop of trying to create a more tightly knit global marketing organization. More and more marketer roles with a pan-geographic focus are surfacing in our conversations with members. Marketing processes are incorporating a more diverse range of inputs from across organizations’ geographic footprint. Resource allocation post-credit crisis tends to be more reflective of countries’ future opportunity versus simply our historical habit of investment.

But amid all of this progress, marketers tell us that they still struggle to see substantial gains in global marketing integration. One member recently commented, “the discussion internally has clearly shifted toward capitalizing on the scale of our international marketing operations but, if anything, it seems that we’re moving further and further apart.”

So, what’s getting in the way? Read More »