It is a key strategic decision for any global brand and its comms department. How should the investment and management of agencies be structured globally?
We moderated a panel session at the second annual Holmes Report Global PR Summit in Miami earlier this month too, which featured a panel of senior global comms professionals who are more than familiar with the challenges of global strategy and coordination. The topic: ‘Building A Global Brand in the Digital Era’. The panel, led by Morgan McLintic, EVP at LEWIS, tackled some of the key issues around global marketing. Here are some of the highlights from the session:
~ What are the biggest challenges for global comms?
“There is more opportunity for brands to go global more quickly now, but it does led to an issue with consistency which is why we brought our PR in centrally” – Emma Keates, PR manager at Unit4
Andrea Fuller, director of global communications at Recommind, thinks the “biggest challenge and opportunity is hyper-growth.” This means the centralization of the comms function “is critical in order to maintain consistency.”
Finding the balance between global and local is a challenge for Stéphanie Saissay, head of comms and social media at Adobe: “The trend is to decrease resources, and do more globally, but you still need to keep enough intelligence locally.”
~ How do you roll-out great ideas? Andrea Fuller relayed: “Creativity has left the building! We rely on our agency to be much more creative than we ever could be.”
For Emma Keates, it’s more on a case-by-case basis: “We encourage friendly competition. We have a central meeting with all agencies to share ideas – it might go global or stay local.”
~ How do you approach global social media? “We deal with social centrally, as you have to give parameters”, says Emma Keates. “We were finding corporate Facebook accounts all over the place!”
~ How do you approach measurement and budgeting challenges? “A major reason for centralizing PR is for budget control. It’s almost a relief to local teams so they can just get on with it,” said Andrea Fuller.
For Stéphanie Saissay it’s important to “listen to local teams and understand where they should be involved. Not everything should be done locally. We measure on a global basis with the same KPIs.”
