What Living and Working Across Cultures Taught Me About Marketing

"I have lived and worked across different countries and cultures for much of my life.  I grew up in Belgium, studied in Spain and France, started my career in the UK and have now lived in the United States for more than two decades. My career has also taken me around the world, marketing brands across countries, languages and cultures."

Helena Verellen, CMO at Second City and Advisory Board Member for The Marketing Society New York explains how that experience has shaped how she thinks about marketing.

Perhaps the biggest lesson I have learned is that before a brand can travel, you need to be absolutely clear about what the brand is. Every brand needs a core that is non-negotiable. What do you stand for? What is your personality? What are your values? What is the promise you are making to your customer?

You need to establish those fundamentals before thinking about how to market the brand in different parts of the world. Because if you change who you are every time you enter a new market, at some point you stop being authentic. Your brand becomes whatever you think people want it to be. That is why establishing clear brand principles and guidelines is so important. They create the guardrails within which marketers can adapt, experiment, and localize.

Work backwards - everywhere

One of the principles that stayed with me from my time at Audible, an Amazon company, was the idea of working backwards. Start with the outcome you want to achieve and then determine how to get there. I have always thought that principle applies particularly well to global marketing. The outcome doesn't change: you want people to understand your brand, its personality and why it should matter to them. But how you get there can be very different in London, Paris, Tokyo, São Paulo or New York.

Tone of voice may need to change. Humor certainly does. The channels through which people discover brands differ. Cultural references, attitudes toward authority, celebrity, status, family, price and even what constitutes good customer service can vary dramatically. Consumer behaviors and tastes that seem completely intuitive in one country can feel foreign in another. Living and working in different countries taught me to recognize those differences, but more importantly, it taught me to listen before assuming.

I am fortunate to speak several languages, and that has certainly helped. But cultural understanding is about much more than speaking the language. Sometimes the most important communication happens in what isn't being said. You have to observe. Ask questions. Be patient. Listen to local teams and local consumers. Look at the data and be prepared for it to tell you something you weren't expecting. And you have to understand what is happening in people's lives at that moment.

Context matters and marketing doesn't operate in a vacuum. If a country is experiencing economic uncertainty, political division, conflict or rapid cultural change, that context influences how consumers see the world - and how they will see your brand. A message that feels uplifting in one environment might feel tone-deaf in another.

Never assume

This is where I think global marketers can sometimes get it wrong. We assume that because we know our brand, we know how consumers will perceive it. Or because something worked incredibly well in one country, we can simply replicate it elsewhere. We can't.

Data can tell us what is happening. Local expertise can help us understand why. And listening to consumers helps us decide what to do next. After years of living and working across cultures, I have come to believe that great global marketing requires an interesting combination of confidence and humility. Be confident enough to protect the core of your brand, the things that should never change.

But be humble enough to recognize that you don't always know the best way to connect that brand with someone whose culture, experiences, and perspective may be very different from your own.