Hybrid glocal marketing structure: how to manage the transformation?

"Reshaping Global Engagement Operations." According to the CMO Council study, hybrid glocal structures are optimal for business success because they allow both customer proximity and uniform brand building. We've summarized how transformation can succeed and the lessons we've learned from serving many global customers in 8 tips.

At Wächter & Wächter Worldwide Partners, we have been helping brands manage the challenges of globalization for more than 25 years and have gained diverse experience with a wide range of organizational models.

For the majority of our German customers, some of whom are global market leaders, we act as the central lead agency. For customers of our international partners, we are the extended workbench. And we have successfully implemented the hybrid model favored in the study with a number of customers and our Worldwide Partners.

From our experience, 4 tips emerge, plus 4 more for choosing your agency partners:

Step by step From the central model to the hybrid model

Even if tight budgets and efficiency criteria only allow for a central model, optimal effectiveness still requires a minimum level of input from the different local markets and output that takes into account cultural country-specific characteristics. Therefore, we recommend at least the following measures:

• Gather local insights: Consult or even better involve your local sales people 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. Easily and quickly request experiential data from our partners around the world 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 of the 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 to German customers, we did not emphasize the sheer new size as we do in America. In Germany, that tends to raise fears of losing importance as a customer. Instead, we focused on securing the future, which is so important in Germany.

When you take such measures, you approach the hybrid model. In such a model, we involve both our partner agencies and our clients' country organizations in brand strategy and campaign development at a very early stage and then delegate implementation largely to the local organizations.

Prerequisite for success: the right agency partners

• 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 on the ground in all key markets who don't want to completely reinvent the wheel. Collaboration works very well for us, perhaps because we think long-term as entrepreneurs and know that investments in collaboration are worthwhile, both for us and for our clients, who can achieve better results from their global marketing campaigns.
• International lead team At Worldwide Partners, we develop the strategy and campaigns in a hybrid model together with the client and its most important market participants in a selected international lead team. In addition, we gather input, insights, ideas and feedback from all other markets.
• CI and strategy manual The lead team also develops a good CI and strategy manual that shows guidelines for implementation, but leaves enough freedom.
• No false vanities 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 the strategy and the global brand image and still meet the local requirements and needs.

The empirical results of the study "Reshaping Global Engagement Operations" confirm the experience of Wächter & Wächter Worldwide Partners and vice versa. The hybrid model is optimal because it allows a global unified brand to be built and, by addressing customers' culture-specific expectations (customer centricity), significantly improves the performance of marketing efforts without driving up costs.

The results of the CMO and Worldwide Partners study are summarized in the article "Hybrid glocal marketing structures: 57% of CMO`s tend to do so".