Global brand governance in the age of marketing transformation | WARC | The Feed

Global brand governance in the age of marketing transformation

Brand governance is daunting within a nation’s borders, let alone on a global scale, but technology is playing a crucial role in making this task more effective and efficient, according to a new white paper from WARC and brand management SaaS platform Frontify. 

The report examines not just how successful brands achieve and excel at consistency, but also how they take into account local cultural differences and cross the language barrier.

Why it matters 

Brand governance deploys a set of models, processes and tools to ensure creative consistency and integrity across a brand’s assets. Such governance on a global scale has been necessary for decades but it is an increasingly topical issue just now: the growth in global brands, combined with the new challenges of media fragmentation, scale-up brands skipping borders, in-housing and marketing transformation, has given rise to many technology-based operating models.

Takeaways

• Selecting the appropriate model and structure to manage brands, depending on their size, resources and complexity of setup, remains integral.
  
• Listening to local marketers aids the production of relevant guidelines, improving trust and adherence when managing local markets/regions.
• Staying updated with cultural norms and trends to help markets navigate new channels and formats can have far greater relevance when delivering global guidelines.
• Defining metrics that can measure and demonstrate comms effectiveness, efficiency, brand value and savings can help to fuel further investment. 

Key quotes

“You work out what’s fixed and what’s flexible, applying the central idea whilst overlaying local insight” – Simon Gregory, Joint Chief Strategy Officer at BBH.

“It pains me to see so many assets created that never get used. We all need to work harder to deliver a more efficient ecosystem” – Caitriona Henry, Global Lead & Strategy Partner at OMD.

Read more in WARC’s white paper: Local, global or glocal? Effective brand governance in the age of marketing transformation