Building global brands requires a healthy amount of trust, said executives at the Brand Innovators “Building Brands with Purpose, Creativity & Emerging Tech Summit” at HSBC’s global headquarters in London this week.
And that trust needs to be earned through quality, consistency and tone. “Trust is a discipline of actions that shows trustworthiness over time,” said John McDonald, chief marketing officer at HSBC at the Brand Innovators. “It’s defined by whether you are confident, how consistent you are in your experience and how you communicate in ways which are authentic to the values you explain.”
“Any dissonance in any one of those three things – quality, consistency or tone – is where you start to see trust erode,” he added. “Trust is situational…It varies by the situation and relationships that you have. I might trust Amazon to deliver parcels. I don’t necessarily want them doing something else in my life. In my friendship group, I might be trusted to look at a set of markets, but let’s say I am trusted to do that. I wouldn’t be the guy who’s trusted to make sure we have the right reservation on Saturday night.”
While trust can take years to earn, it can be lost in an instant, said Kristy McCready, head of advertising & marketing communications at HSBC.
As a huge fan of Sweaty Betty leggings because of their quality and as a brand that supports women in all stages of life – pregnant, menopausal – she started to feel some doubt in the brand when a pair tore during a 10k run. It turned out, she wasn’t the only customer to have issues but the brand came out and addressed it head on and changed their manufacturing. “They looked at their manufacturing processes, and they changed that and they were quite honest and open about it,” said McCready. “It’s not a big global brand, but it’s one that shows it listens to its audience and then the trust starts to come back.”
Association is another key element when it comes to building brand trust. “If you’re advertising on a reputable publisher, the trust from that publisher spills over into your brand,” said Richard Pallister, senior brand manager at Vodafone.
Brands in culture
One solid way that brands try to earn trust is today’s day is through showing up within culture, but the ones that succeed do a lot more than just slapping a celebrity on their brand and calling it a day.
“You don’t want to just chase trends the whole time, you have to understand what trends are right for you and when it is appropriate to come into a conversation. That for me is around making the brands more 3D,” said Georgia Durham, global culture & entertainment, Don Papa Rum at Diageo. “Often we are thinking about brands more clinically. For me, I try and think about a brands like a human being. If my brand is a person what kinds of places would they want to hang out at? Who would they listen to? What would they wear? And that gives me a new point of what is authentic versus we’re just following a trend because other people are doing it.”
Ross Taylor, CEO, Havas Play Network, gave a keynote in which he noted some work that agency has done with adidas, including showing during the UEFA Women’s Europa Cup in Switzerland with The Three Stripe social club, encouraging women to show up in their adidas fashions through Reddit, TikTok and tapping tattoo and t-shirt artists. The two companies also worked together on a collaboration with the band Oasis during their reunion tour last summer, in which they created a jersey modeled after football jerseys with the band’s name. It became a uniform at the gigs, said Taylor.
Taylor also stressed the importance of connecting with real people for these kinds of activations. “Don’t try and replicate culture with AI,” said Taylor.
Global starts local
“Building global brands requires values, purpose and a logo to stay consistent across markets, but things like tone of voice and market positioning of the products are much more flexible and they should be in order to appeal to the consumers,” said Sarah Firmston-Williams, senior brand marketing manager, international brand integration at Expedia.
As places like Brazil, China, India are now leading the growth in travel consumption, Expedia doesn’t treat its brand as static in these very different places. “With all of these markets coming to the forefront, we need to learn to speak to those consumers properly in a way that connects with them enough to choose us over another brand and another brand that is local within their market,” she said.
When entering localized markets, Electrolux’s chief marketing officer Nikos Bartzoulianos, advises against a top down approach from the ivory tower of a global headquarters.
“What I’ve seen working the best way is to invite the market heads, get their point of view, make them feel part of it. Ok, we are going to have one global campaign to maximize the chances of this campaign working for your markets, give me your input,” he said. “Obviously we cannot please everyone. To the extent we can collaborate, we can agree where we can localize, what can change and what cannot change.”
