Hybrid glocal marketing structure: how to manage the transformation? 8 tips.

According to a CMO Council study hybrid glocal marketing structures deliver best business results, short and long term, because they allow both customer centricity and strong brand building. We've summarized the lessons we've learned from serving many global or pan-european clients. Here are 8 tips for a successful transformation to such a hybrid glocal structure.

According to a CMO Council study, called “Reshaping Global Engagement Operations" hybrid glocal structures are optimal for business success because they allow both customer centricity and uniform brand building. This report, produced in partnership with Worldwide Partners some years ago, reveals that marketing operational structures may be keeping the customer and brand apart. Indeed, with all the economic headwinds global marketers are struggling more than ever in a battle between the efficiency of centralization and the effectiveness of localization, causing them to re-think their current mar-ops strategies and to start the transformation to a hybrid organization.

At Wächter Worldwide Partners, we have been helping brands manage the challenges of globalization for more than 25 years and have gained experience with diverse organizational models. For many of our German clients, who are operating globally, we act as the central lead agency. For several of the clients of our international partners, we are the extended workbench. And with an ever-growing number of clients, we have successfully implemented the hybrid glocal model favored in the study.

We've summarized the lessons we've learned from serving these global or pan-european clients. Here are 8 tips for a successful transformation. From our experience, 4 tips emerge for approaching a hybrid glocal model, plus 4 more for implementing it and for choosing the right agency partners.

Step by step from the central model to the hybrid model
Today’s digitally connected consumer seeks more localized, personalized experiences that are relevant to their own cultural context and situation. So, even if tight budgets and efficiency criteria only allow for a central model, to reach optimal effectiveness still requires a minimum level of input from the different local markets and output that considers cultural country-specific characteristics. Therefore, we recommend at least the following measures:

  • Gather local insights:
    Involve your local salespeople or your distributors, e.g., when developing personas. We have developed an online brainstorming tool in our network that allows global participation without high travel costs.
  • Seek partners who can provide you with local customer perspectives:
    Work with agency partners and service providers who can provide you with unbiased information and insights on customer perspectives. We offer to collect data through our worldwide partners around the world using our quick research tools or, if budget allows, coordinate in-depth market analysis.
  • Check your strategies and campaigns:
    We often have our strategic and creative proposals checked for their impact by our partners in the network. This can also be a simple, low-cost online check with our 80 agency partners and their 3,000 employees or detailed market research.
  • Commission transcreation instead of translation:
    Literal translation is far from sufficient; messages should be tailored to the expectations and values of the target groups. For example, when sending a message about a merger (US-Europe) to German customers, we did not emphasize the sheer new size as it is done in America. In Germany, that tends to raise fears of losing importance as a customer.

 

The best way a hybrid model works

But often these measures are not enough to reach customer engagement and your revenue goals. A hybrid, glocal organizational model is needed. This is a call to action for marketers and agencies alike, notes John Harris, President and CEO of Worldwide Partners, Inc. “Marketers want customer-centric solutions on a global scale, but they cannot get there with a centralized strategy and top-down approach that prioritizes standardization over localization. They need to structure for market-inspired experiences to deliver personalized, contextualized and culturally relevant experiences effectively and efficiently. Otherwise, they’ll miss opportunities, undermine brand perception and compromise business results.”

In a hybrid glocal model, you and your agency partner both preferably install a global or regional lead team consisting of members of the HQ und the most important markets. Both teams should collaborate closely. Involve all, your partner agencies and your country organizations in brand strategy and campaign development at a very early stage and then delegate implementation largely to the local organizations. But there is a prerequisite for success: you need the right agency partners

  • With passion for and experience with collaboration
    For a hybrid model to work, you need both dedicated agencies at the respective HQ location who believe in collaboration and have experience with it, and equally dedicated agencies in all key markets who don't want to completely reinvent the wheel. (Collaboration works very well for us within Worldwide Partners, the Indie-Network, because we think long-term as entrepreneurs. We know that investments in collaboration are worthwhile, both for us and for our clients, who can achieve better results from their global marketing campaigns.)
  • With an international lead team
    A selected international lead team develops strategy and campaigns with you and your most important market participants. In addition, they gather input, insights on buying behaviors, pain points of targets, legal restrictions, and creative ideas and feedback from all other markets for a better local market understanding.
  • With experience in developing inspiring brand guidance
    The lead team also develops a brand-CI and communicates your brand´s values and aspirations, thus fostering trust and credibility. Additionally, they forward a clear vision of the brand engagement strategy in manuals and guidelines for implementation, helping local teams to understand their role in the bigger picture, thus allowing to leave enough freedom. 
  • Without false vanity
    If you cooperate already during the strategy development, it is much easier to implement it afterwards without friction losses and false vanities in such a way that local actions pay off on strategy and global brand image and still meet local requirements and customer needs.

 

Working in such a hybrid glocal model with an agency partner, that aligns with this, significantly improves the performance of marketing efforts without driving up cost. Building centrally a global, unified brand, addressing locally customers' culture-specific expectations, thus focusing on customer centricity helps to reach business goals. The CMO study reveals the same: According to marketers in hybrid operational structures, the top three benefits of their operations include a better understanding of the local customer, a crystal-clear understanding of strategy and goals, as well as heightened efficiency that optimizes impact of spend.

In the blog “International brand management - centralized or decentralized? Efficient or effective?” (here), we describe in more details how we collaborate with our centralized, decentralized and hybrid clients and within our Worldwide Partners network to reach the best business results.

The results of the CMO council study are summarized in the blog article "RESHAPING GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT OPERATIONS. Hybrid glocal marketing structures are needed. (here)
The CMO Council has 16,000+ members. 300+ globally responsible CMOs took part in the study.  

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Author:inside

Peter Breiling

CEO Wächter and next gen council member Worldwide Partners.Inc.

Ingrid Wächter-Lauppe

CEO Wächter Worldwide Partners GmbH and board member Worldwide Partners Inc.