Managing International Marketing: It’s All About Balance

Should your international marketing be strictly controlled from the centre? Or should all of the countries be given free rein? The answer is that neither extreme is a recipe for success.

When I’ve managed pan-European marketing teams, my job seemed to be like trying to hold a butterfly in my hand. If you hold a butterfly too tightly, you’ll damage it, and it will lose the ability to fly. If you don’t hold it firmly enough, it will just fly away into the blue, and you’ll be left with an empty hand.

Managing international marketing requires subtle handling too. If you impose worldwide or European-wide marketing programmes on all countries, you’ll crush the creativity and will to succeed of in-country marketing people. And, if you don’t have some degree of discipline and cohesion, your marketing won’t communicate your company’s messages adequately, and it will cost you more than it should.

So, effective marketing across several countries, product types or brands, is all about finding the right balance – learning how to hold a butterfly.

What Do You Need to Achieve?

Let’s say that you’re responsible for marketing across several countries – for example across Europe. Here are some of the things that will probably be uppermost in your mind.

• Ensure that strong company branding is used, with consistent use of logos, colours, and key messages.
• Get the most out of your people, harnessing their creativity and ingenuity, whether they are designing programmes for use across Europe, or running localised campaigns in a single country.
• Achieve economies of scale from marketing programmes that have the widest possible use.
• Make sure that local sales activity is supported effectively.
• Give potential customers in each country reassurance that, while you are an international company, you have a strong local presence, and you are in tune with the issues current in that market.

What happens if you get the balance wrong? Let’s look at the probable results of the extreme cases of too much centralisation, and too much localisation.

Too Much Centralisation

• Your company’s key messages are not well understood in each country. Sometimes, it’s just a nuance that needs to be altered in order for you to communicate your message effectively in another country, culture and language. At other times, substantial revisions would have to be made to a centrally designed programme, to be able to communicate its underlying message accurately.
• In-country marketing and sales don’t operate in a creative, problem-solving manner. They wait to see what’s delivered from the centre and blame the centre for all the failures of marketing.
• Your marketing is insensitive to trends and issues in each country.

Too Much Localisation

• Your company’s key messages are not well understood in each country. Sometimes, it’s just a nuance that needs to be altered in order for you to communicate your message effectively in another country, culture and language. At other times, substantial revisions would have to be made to a centrally designed programme, to be able to communicate its underlying message accurately.
• In-country marketing and sales don’t operate in a creative, problem-solving manner. They wait to see what’s delivered from the centre and blame the centre for all the failures of marketing.
• Your marketing is insensitive to trends and issues in each country.
• Your marketing is expensive, with no economies of scale achieved, because every programme is designed in-country and is not re-used elsewhere.
• You have a strong local presence, but you lose the strength of being an international company because your branding is inconsistently used in the country. These days, everything is visible on the web, and it’s easy to find examples of companies that don’t take care to ensure that their branding is consistently used across their web sites. The impression given by this is that the company is not as well managed as it could be: customers like to see their suppliers have a consistent company image.

When You Get The Balance Right

The good news is that an appropriate balance can be found – you can hold that marketing butterfly. The balance point I’m talking about is that of appropriate decisions being made about:

• What each person’s responsibilities are, when they are involved in marketing.
• Who holds the budget for which activity.
• What are the appropriate processes for creating and approving marketing programmes – who needs to be involved, and who needs to approve the programme and be responsible for its success.

It is possible to have wonderfully creative marketing programmes designed in-country, that can be re-used elsewhere with little or no modification. And it’s possible to design pan-European marketing programmes that achieve economies of scale, and yet with tiny modifications to the programme being made for each country, be entirely in-step with what your potential customers in each country need to hear.

Do You Want the Good News, Or the Bad News?

The bad news is that, firstly, this takes a lot of work to manage. And secondly, there isn’t one way of doing this that is suitable for all organisations, or even for all types of marketing activity within one company. You may need to find a different balance point for public relations from the one you have for lead generation, for example.

But the good news is that when you get it right, it is very satisfying and cost-effective. And the impact of your marketing is much, much greater.

If you face these issues, be encouraged that it is possible to hold that marketing butterfly without crushing it or letting it escape. Perhaps you can use this analogy to explain to the people around you that you need their help in finding the appropriate balance: include them in forming the solution rather than leave them as part of the problem. Then you can work with them to ensure that your resources are used effectively to achieve clear objectives for all the stakeholders involved.