PM360 Greatest Creators June 2011

Global Branding–Forging an International Brand: One World. One Campaign.

By Christian Bauman

Every marketer wants to be able to launch a single campaign that resonates with audiences around the globe, but that kind of campaign is not right for every brand. For one global campaign to work you need a single message and a unified audience.

The Single Global Campaign:
The “It’s Lantus Time” campaign was executed identically in 40 markets around the world including the countries listed here as well as Afghanistan, Egypt, Morocco, Yugoslavia, and more. It was able to work as a single global campaign, because the brand had a single message that would resonate with physicians: Lantus could help get diabetes patients’ A1C level under the recommended 7%.

There are still a few universal truths left in our business. For instance, one of my favorites: “An agency’s creative work will only ever be as good as the client lets them.” (The fact that there are few clients I would say that to doesn’t make it any less true.) Another one is: “A global campaign will only ever be as good as it is single-minded.”

The single, unified, iconic global campaign has emerged as a kind of Holy Grail for many marketers— whether appropriate or not. It’s elusive, and I rarely actually see them come to execution, but it seems to be the ultimate starting goal of your average global brand manager, whether driven through an internal expectation, or on the marketer’s own judgment. There is a powerful, Admiral-like feeling in being the hand launching the fleet of 40 powerful, identical ships around the world.

We know what this approach gets us in the consumer world when successfully executed: the Apple silhouettes, the drive of Nike, the community feel of Coca-Cola. What does it get us in the professional pharma world? The effect of every physician worldwide marching to the same drummer, absorbing the same images and messages no matter where they are in the world: from a PDA in a hospital corridor in Cape Town, to an interactive congress panel in Tokyo, to a spread ad in JAMA.

One World. One Campaign.
The effective single global campaign is based on a recipe of one key ingredient: a single core message. A good example is the “It’s Lantus Time” campaign that Havas Worldwide Health executed for Sanofi-Aventis. The campaign had one reason for being: to communicate the new A1C<7% goal in diabetes, and the ability of Lantus to get patients there. It was a powerful, driving message. The agency created one global campaign that was executed identically in 40 markets around the world. Talk about message discipline—there wasn’t a relevant physician on the planet who didn’t hear it loud and clear.

Another example is the original launch campaign for Pfizer’s Lyrica. An antiepileptic by category, Lyrica’s major indications would be in pain (diabetic peripheral neuropathy, neuropathic pain, and later
fibromyalgia), with an additional ex-US indication for generalized anxiety. Some of the prescribing physicians would overlap (PCPs, neurologists, and psychiatrists, for instance, might touch several of Lyrica’s indications), so separate campaigns might not make sense. The goal at launch was to communicate not just the product’s efficacy in its individual indications, but also in an umbrella sense to explain why one product could effectively be the solution for these disparate conditions. The agency’s answer was the iconic Lyrica “water” launch campaign, that made a quick visual explanation (no translation needed!) of how all these conditions had hyperexcited neurons at the root, and that Lyrica calmed these hyperexcited neurons.

Word of caution: Of course, experience shows that a single worldwide message is directly at odds with many of today’s pharma marketers, especially the less experienced ones, who tend to want to “kitchen-sink” any communication, layering on message after message, all of them at equally high priority. If a single global campaign is appropriate for your brand, and you want the campaign to actually work, focus and discipline are essential.

But is it right for your brand?
All of the above assumes that this is the correct direction for your brand. But perhaps not. A single, unified campaign is a product of a single-minded message—not the other way around. What do
I mean by that? I mean that you can’t force-fit this situation. If you’re a Lantus, and have one single message and goal worldwide, and know for sure that it is relevant to your audience worldwide, then yes, you’re a perfect candidate for the single global campaign. But if your story is much more complicated than that, or (even more important) your target audience isn’t unified, then you would be making a huge mistake to attempt a single global campaign, just because you think you should. Trust me: you shouldn’t.

The world is a big, complicated place. Maybe you have a single universal idea that will appeal to everyone in the world, maybe not. If you don’t, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and it shouldn’t be forced, especially in our industry. The mindset and reality of a young male physician in Philadelphia are very different from those of an experienced female physician in Beijing. I recently worked with a client who had an internal corporate expectation for a single global launch campaign. But the launch reality for this brand was going to be very different in all their various global markets: different labels, different regulations, and quite different physician perceptions of the product and the need. Our advice to this client was to push back on their boss’s request and launch this brand with targeted campaigns with the right message for the right audience in each region. Attempting a single global launch for this brand would have meant a completely watered-down campaign with no true impact on anyone.

Choose wisely
As with anything in marketing, your first step in deciding how to launch a global brand is a fearless self-assessment. An honest inventory of alignment (or lack thereof) among your audiences, messages, and internal stakeholders will be your guide toward maximum impact on a global basis.

Christian Bauman is managing director and chief creative officer at H4B Chelsea, an agency in the Havas Worldwide Health network. Contact him at cbauman@health4brands.com.