By: Janéa Hampton
At the Midwest Digital Marketing Conference last month I attended the session “Managing a Global Brand in a Multicultural World” by Veena Ramesh of Johnson & Johnson. This was a very insightful presentation because I didn’t realize how much actually goes into global marketing.
Veena Ramesh is a global digital strategist that specializes in beauty brands: Neutrogena, Dove, Aveeno and Clean & Clear just to name a few.
Content Models
Content models were used to explain how useful they can be for each market. You have to know the context of your market so that the insight can live within the context. Veena posed the question: Which one is the most useful for your brand and when you should use a specific model? She stated that with J&J being a big company with 56 markets with her managing 20+ of those markets they should be doing just global marketing. She stated this is when you run into those inconsistency and inefficiency when trying to use content models because you have to make sure you are using the correct model. You have to learn to balance your context within each content model so that is why J&J uses all three: Global, Regional and Local so that they can have an overall powerful insight. J&J solved this issue by using siege content which has the concentration, triality, voice, and the message they want to put forward. Then that is when their markets are given the opportunity to come up with localized content that can reach their demographics with individualized storytelling to capture their consumers’ heart.
When she spoke about content markets, it stuck out to me the most. It gave me a better understanding of why brands market differently to different demographics. The storytelling behind each commercial or ad campaign has a different purpose for each content model. Using these content models will ensure that you have the empathy and compelling storytelling piece to keep or gain consumers. As consumers, we buy certain products for different reasons and when a brand can gain our attentions with the right content that is how we become brand loyalists.
I overall enjoyed the entire presentation that Veena presented. As a bonus, I tweeted that the session was very insightful and tagged Veena in it. She retweeted the post and followed me on Twitter. How sweet!!!. She really opened my eyes on how I viewed global marketing as a whole.