By Sam Wright, Senior Account Director at VaynerMedia EMEA
Landing a unified message through a global marketing campaign is tough. Speaking to different markets comes with the complexity of very different cultures and languages.
We’ve all seen badly dubbed ads that don’t take into consideration cultural nuances and differences in brand perception. At best, it’s going to be an ineffective piece of work. At worst, you risk creating something that might actually harm your brand.
Which seems crazy to us, because the shared language we all speak is social media. As of April 2024, Statista reported that average global use is 143 minutes per day, amounting to a huge share of where consumer attention is focused. We strongly believe that it is where modern brands are built and we put social media at the centre of everything we do.
So, if you’re in need of a multi-market toolkit to drive your brand’s key message, you should start with an audit of what’s happening on social for your audiences.
Using local strategists, you can identify what is resonating with your target audiences. Having all this data then allows you to take things a step further. You’re able to really delve deep into what common themes connect your audiences across the globe.
We do this all the time, using social media as an insights tool we narrow down and bring to life complex and diverse ‘cohorts’ that we then make highly tailored content for. Meaning an effective way to communicate with multiple people at scale.
Once you have your cohorts and yku understand what they like and dislike, you can use that information to focus the creative and make a start on your hero content.
We recently did this for 7UP, creating a toolkit that sat behind work launching in Mexico, Egypt, Portugal, Thailand and Vietnam.
In order to connect with hugely different audiences, we needed to know what was working in those markets on social and what wasn’t. Using our cohorts as inspiration, we built ideas that would be relevant for them and then listened to what we call signals – cultural moments happening on social platforms – so we could build a visual world that would speak to them.
It led to the creation of a modular hero film – where the narrative stayed the same – but the scenes flexed to suit market needs.
We then created bespoke, social-first assets, exploring everything from mocktail recipes to video transitions that made the product look delicious.
The final pieces of creative all held their own individuality and character but were clearly communicating the same products, the same branding and the same key brand messages. All while feeling unique to their market and native to the social platforms. Adding all of this together, you get to our global brand toolkit.
It is time to move on from global toolkits that lack relevance to local markets. By using this model, and starting with listening via social platforms – a free resource might we add – the creative from global brands can have much more impact.
You can unpick the shared topics or passions that unite your audiences while also identifying the things that are unique to them and where they’re from.
No more generic ads. Instead, cultural relevance on a global scale.
