How are cultural touch points and localization strategies important?

Kelly: It’s really important to have the ability to adapt—the freedom within the frame. But then knowing how exactly you adapt is about getting close to your end customer in each market. A lot of brands rely on local agencies or team members to channel what the customer wants, because every market is slightly different: ‘Customers in this market really like this flavor, or this color, or we’re not going to launch that campaign on that day because that’s a bad luck day in this market.’ 

It’s down to the detail of what do customers really value in that market? What’s our competitive situation in that market? And also, what is our goal in that market? Your goal is not always the same in every market. Even though ultimately our goal as marketers is to help drive sales and revenue for products, it might be slightly different in each country because it might be: This product is doing well, but this one isn’t, and we need to increase sales of that specific product, whereas in another country that might be your flagship. The local strategy has to tie to the local business goal and how it rolls up to the global strategy. 

It gets very complex inside companies when they are trying to determine how to map the global strategy to the local ones. That’s where communication breakdowns often happen. But staying close to the customer is the ultimate best practice. 

Asking the customer directly is the No. 1  best way to get feedback. I happen to be a little biased here because I work for a consumer insights firm, and that’s what we do. We help our customers in many markets capture feedback and data directly from consumers all the time. The No. 1 way to succeed in any market, whether it’s local or global, is to be customer led, customer driven, and really at the heart of where your customers are. 

Companies have had to manage the dynamic between global and local strategies for decades, but now we’ve got social media, creators and everything immediately being everywhere. How has that changed what marketers need to do?

I talk a lot with my own team customers about marrying offline and online. As we are digitizing, online is becoming more important, whether it’s mobile apps, social media, or influence. Where you are commercializing your product, and where are you engaging with customers. The number of spaces has dramatically increased. It’s multiplying like gremlins. The more of those we have, the more complex it gets for marketers. 

When you’re online, you’re global first. When you’re offline, you’re local first because your physical presence on the ground matters more. But when you're online, you have to think about global reach no matter what. 

In my view, online requires global for strategies and offline requires local for strategies. But it’s not that they don’t also require each other at every touch point, because you are going to want to capitalize on local reach with TikTok, Instagram or whatever social channel you’re using. Those influencers have a local, targeted, curated following. 

This marriage of online and offline—and local and global—is becoming very interesting and harder than ever for marketers to parse. It all comes down to segmentation, and knowing, ‘Okay, I’m using this influencer for this strategy. I know she’s very popular in the U.S. market, and I know that she’s got millions of followers.’ 

What a lot of marketers might not do is get the breakdown. What percentage of your followers are in the U.S.? What percentage are in Europe? What countries in Europe? What languages do they speak? What’s the engagement rate by market, by country? And you can determine: Is this a global play, or is it a U.S./U.K. play? Is it English-speaking markets only, or does this person speak Spanish, too? If so, maybe it’s the U.S. Latino market and Latin America because she’s got reach in multiple countries and languages.

There’s almost no such thing as one country and one language anymore, because the second you’re online, you reach a global audience. I often say it’s like throwing a rock in a pond: Are you going to throw it in a big pond, or are you going to throw it in a small pond? Are you going to throw a bunch of pebbles, or are you going to throw one big rock? It’s really about what kind of reach do we want? What kind of penetration do we want, and how are we going to make that happen?

What do marketers not know about global strategies, local strategies and how to make them work?

There are two things. The first is how different they need to be by market, as we all come with our own assumptions about our home market that we live in. People always assume that there’s more in common than there is, and they assume that things will work similarly when they might not. The No. 1 reason that they don’t work similarly is time in market. You almost always start in one market at a time. What ends up happening is the next market you go into, you’re at a different place in terms of penetrating that market. 

You may be the No. 1 brand in your category in the U.S. market. People assume, ‘I’ll just take this exact campaign in the U.S. and put it in the Canadian market because it’s a smaller market and speaks the same language.’ Actually, there’s more than one language in Canada, and there might be very different buying behaviors there, and there’s different competitors there.

The second one is what I would call proximity bias. We are constantly seeing, hearing, watching the news, driving by advertising, walking on the street, and we forget that they’re part of our collective knowledge about our own country and local market. We just assume everybody else knows those things, and it’s underneath the waterline. 

In the book, we have this concept of the iceberg of culture. On the top is the basics of culture: We speak different languages. We are in different parts of the world. It’s a different economy. But when you go underneath it, there’s all these other things, like: Who are the competitors in this market? What are the representations of gender in this market? How do people purchase things? What’s the right price point? Do they expect a freebie gift with purchase in this market versus another? I hear this all the time from friends who go to Korea or Japan: ‘I got two bags of free things and I only bought one product,’ whereas in the U.S., they’re very stingy about that.