Regardless of their home base, CMOs will need to market where they see the most opportunity for growth and expansion. And aspects of an organization's social "graph" that is, how it engages with its audiences or its brand reputation will continue to transcend borders, making the global CMO role even more complex and challenging.
The results of EffectiveBrands' 2009 Leading Global Brands Study, which includes responses from some 21,500 global marketers who work on over 250+ brands across all industries, indicated that getting the right balance between local versus global is a top challenge. Nearly 65 percent of respondents confirmed that global brands have become more important over the last five years. But only 15 percent fully agreed that their global brands were effectively leveraging scale. Even few marketers believed that their organizations excelled at quickly rolling out successful global brand initiatives.
Bresh himself acknowledged the complexity in his own business. In his interview, he claimed that the business has turned 180 degrees because "instead of having lots of different fragmented campaigns in 35 markets around the world, our budget just won't allow us to do that. So we're taking a much more global approach in a sense that we have now stripped down to five central campaign themes that are promoted consistently around the world. There's a much more proactive lead from the central marketing team based in London." And he and his team have leveraged the consolidation of traditional marketing, public relations and digital into a much more effective and hard-working formula which has won several awards and which, hopefully, reaches would-be visitors much earlier in the marketing cycle.