GUEST COMMENTARY

Beyond the Global Branding Kit
BY ROB DHOBLE

Global pharmaceutical marketing isn’t easy. Any of those who are doing it or have done it know what I mean. The discipline requires a special combination of skills, including leadership, consensus building, consultation, persistence, entrepreneurship, and discretion. In addition to possessing these special skills, those now in global marketing are learning that the branding kit has gone from being the core deliverable to just one of many.
Certainly global branding is a common sense objective, and branding kits (or core packs as most ex-US marketers call them) are fundamental to brand integrity and marketing efficiency. They do not, however, have very much to do with empowering local marketing cost-effectiveness. I am referring to the increasing importance of global influence on local campaigning across the channels of digital, personal promotion, and events and the disciplines of public relations, promotional medical education, and advertising. How a brand strategically and measurably engages its customer base in local markets is the point.
Local Campaigning
For global brand managers to enjoy real success, they must ensure that country managers are not needlessly developing their local campaigns in comfortable vacuums but instead learning of ongoing local campaigning successes and failures experienced in other markets. The global marketer must facilitate the transfer of brand campaigning knowledge between markets in as real time as possible—or face the very real possibility of being outdone by competitors who think and act more swiftly. Local campaign tactics may or may not always be directly transferrable, but often the ideas behind them can be. While this “point person” role sounds relatively simple, keep in mind that proud local marketers may not always take too kindly to sharing their “special sauce” with others in “competitive” country markets. Local marketers may be even more reticent to express their failures to their global brand management colleagues, given the implications to them corporately, including perceptions of their general manager superiors. Quite quickly successful global brand managers realize that they are not just managing the integrity and value proposition of a worldwide brand; they are helping their country-level colleagues co-manage their personal careers in parallel.
While a great deal of effort is expended in coordinating global brands across markets, most activities have historically focused on managing the collective understanding of similarities and differences between the markets of the U.S. and Western Europe. While this U.S.-Western European coordination alone can certainly be a daunting task, today’s global marketer is typically charged with supporting markets with much larger growth potential. Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Brazil, Korea, India, and Mexico have become the growth markets of interest for most pharmaceutical firms, stretching the capacities of global marketers even more broadly.

The HR Factor
In essence, the global pharmaceutical marketer has a very special job that can at times seem more like a general management or human resources function. Given the interpersonal, competitive and cross-cultural dynamics within any multinational organization, it can seem an uphill battle to keep country managers on strategy and abreast of campaign successes and failures from other markets in a timely fashion. In doing so, global brand marketers keep their corporations one step ahead of competitors and support their country colleagues more than any branding kit possibly can by helping to inform the development of the most relevant brand campaign approaches for individual markets.

Rob Dhoble is President of Diversified Agency Services Healthcare at Omnicom Group. He can be reached at rob.dhoble@dasglobal.com.

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