"For global brands to enjoy significant growth, they must look to emerging economies."

Half the money we spend on advertising is wasted. Trouble is, we don't know which half.

"Research companies, Nielson, Milward Brown and Research International were quickly deployed and an antidote was developed."

During the same four years, the US economy and many other developed economies haven't, in real terms, grown at all and any future economic growth will be hampered by massive debt. The developed economies are becoming increasingly dependant on the developing nations to deliver much needed growth to the world economy, not so much anymore as a source of cheep labour but increasingly for their fast growing domestic markets. For global brands to enjoy significant growth, they must look to emerging economies.

If a brand means anything at all, it means consistent delivery. A coke or a Mars bar should always look, feel and taste like a coke or a Mars bar; that's the brand promise. But as many global brand owners discovered, not only had their brands already made the journey through franchise and distribution deals and sucked into emerging markets by local demand, but there were wild variations in delivery and communications.

Brand logos and colours had morphed, packaging was haphazard and in many cases, the product didn't make the grade. In addition, there appeared to be too much fat in marketing budgets. Unilever said to themselves, as Henry Ford said nearly a century earlier, 'Half the money we spend on advertising is wasted. Trouble is, we don't know which half." Naturally, there was a sudden lurch towards standardisation.

Much of this happened around the early and mid nineties when multi-nationals reinvented themselves as global corporations. Regional hubs were established, poor performing sub-bands were culled, brand identity manuals with attached CDs containing logos, print materials and even language guides were distributed and pan-regional or even global communication campaigns were developed and produced.

Gaining control over local brand communications resulted in control over local budgets which were duly funnelled to the hub and these huge, centralised budgets enabled pan-regional TV and print materials to leap in production values. As the newly proliferating satellite TV beamed content and advertising across regions and the internet provided access to content from anywhere, local product communications suddenly looked like the nineteen fifties while global brands, with their international sparkle looked like now. As the millennium turned, growth of global brands hit double, even triple figures.

A good example was Guinness' pan-African/pan Caribbean Michael Power campaign. A fictional James Bond-like brand ambassador character, jumped from helicopters, climbed buildings and charmed females in a multi-million dollar, three year series of ads. During this period, Nigerians drank more Guinness than the United Kingdom and Guinness grew in Ghana faster than in any country in the world and gained a greater share of the beer market than in Ireland itself.

By this time, the now shrunken in-country brand teams' and agencies' noses were well out of joint and they began reporting troubling news. What world-class gains, local relevance loses and the spectacular growth of global brands began to slow. Local product marketeers had quickly found their answer; national pride. They employed local spoken and visual languages, local humour and local lore. Where they couldn't compete in production values, they competed in entertainment value and relevance. In South Africa, people went around saying, "local is lekker", meaning local is cool. The global brands, in attempting to mean so much to so many, had developed pan-regional campaigns that blanded out the communications. Research companies, Nielson, Milward Brown and Research International were quickly deployed to understand the the thoughts and ideals of the consumers on the ground and an antidote was developed. Marketing budgets flowed back to local brand teams, new, more flexible brand guideline manuals were produced and distributed and local advertising agencies sprang to life with a new buzz word: global-local.

Unilever and SABMiller with their master brand and sub-brand architecture were quick off the mark, developing local fighter brands with punchy, lo-budget media campaigns. Barclays with its monolithic brand architecture produced a global advertising template into which local content could be poured, Guinness and Coca Cola took more than half their TV, Radio and Billboard (above-the-line) budgets and lavished it on on-the-ground, (below-the-line) events, festivals and promotions. It's a pendulum that's sure to swing back, or swing wildly in another direction completely. Every time you take another snapshot the picture changes.

What does all this mean if you have a product or service that's destined to travel overseas? You'll start by taking the communications you use at home and translating the language and perhaps the photo to suit wherever it's going but at some point you'll have to think about what your brand really stands for in universal human values.The UK advertising agency for Levi's developed an interesting concept called brand chord. Even though there may be five notes in a chord, it's not necessary to play them all at once. So where levi's stands for youth, rebellion, America, comfort and cool, you don't have to put them all in a single communication. It would be no benefit to Heinz Beans, for example, to play their 'America' note here in the UK but would be fine, perhaps, for them to fly the stars and stripes in Puerto Rico. You would only know the answer to that though, if you were in the head of someone who grew up with Heinz in the UK or Pueto Rico.

Ultimately, a brand only exists in the minds of the consumers, too many marketers focus on the images that they've communicated rather than the images that have been received or that are already there. A brand campaign always starts with talking less and listening more.

Colin Charles