[Co Hujroh]

Assigning Responsibility

Local managers often believe that their situation is unique—and therefore, that insights and best practices from other countries can’t be applied to their markets. Their belief is based in part on justifiable confidence in their knowledge of the country, the competitive milieu, and the consumers. Any suggestion that such confidence is misplaced can feel threatening. Moreover, people are comfortable with strategies that have already proven effective. The local brand managers may fear that they will be coerced or enticed into following a strategy that doesn’t measure up to their current efforts.
Most companies today have a decentralized culture and structure. They find it difficult, therefore, to persuade country teams to quickly and voluntarily accept and implement a global best practice. To ensure that local teams overcome such reluctance, an individual or group must be in charge of the global brand. Our research suggests that responsibility for global brand leadership can follow four possible configurations: business management team, brand champion, global brand manager, and global brand team. The first two are led by senior executives; the latter two by middle managers.

BUSINESS MANAGEMENT TEAM
This approach is most suitable when the company’s top managers are marketing or branding people who regard brands as the key asset to their business. P&G fits that description. Each of its 11 product categories is run by a global category team. The teams consist of the four managers who have line responsibility for R&D, manufacturing, and marketing for the category within their region. Each team is chaired by an executive vice president who also has a second line job. For example, the head of health and beauty aids in Europe also chairs the hair care global category team. The teams meet five or six times a year.
Because the teams are made up of top-level line executives, there are no organizational barriers to carrying out decisions. At the country level, P&G’s brand and advertising managers implement the strategy. Thus local bias cannot get in the way of the company’s global brand leadership.
The 11 teams strive to create global brands without weakening brand strength locally. They define the identity and position of brands in their categories throughout the world. They encourage local markets to test and adopt brand-building programs that have been successful elsewhere. And they decide which brands will get new product advances. For example, Elastesse, the chemical compound that helps people eliminate “helmet head,” was first added to the company’s Pantene product line rather than one of its three sister brands.

BRAND CHAMPION
This is a senior executive, possibly the CEO, who serves as the brand’s primary advocate and nurturer. The approach is particularly well suited to companies whose top executives have a passion and talent for brand strategy. Companies like Sony, Gap, Beiersdorf (Nivea), and Nestle meet that description. Nestle has a brand champion for each of its 12 corporate strategic brands. As is true for the leaders of P&G’s business management teams, each brand champion at Nestle has a second assignment. Thus the vice president for nutrition is the brand champion for Carnation, and the vice president for instant coffee is the brand champion for Taster’s Choice (known as Nescafe outside the United States). At Nestle, brand leadership is not just talk. The additional work that the brand champion takes on has resulted in a change in the company’s performance-evaluation and compensation policies.
A brand champion approves all brand-stretching decisions (to put the Carnation label on a white milk chocolate bar, for example) and monitors the presentation of the brand worldwide. He or she must be familiar with local contexts and managers, identify insights and best practices, and propagate them through sometimes forceful suggestions. In some companies, such as Sony, the brand champion owns the country brand identities and positions and takes responsibility for ensuring that 
the country teams implement the brand strategy. A brand champion has credibility and respect not only because of organizational power but also because of a depth of experience, knowledge, and insight. A suggestion from a brand champion gets careful consideration.
P&G plans to evolve over the next decade toward a brand champion approach. It believes that it can
achieve greater cooperation and create more global brands by concentrating authority and responsibility in the hands of high-level brand champions. At the moment, P&G regards only a handful of its 83 major brands as global.
GLOBAL BRAND MANAGER
In many companies, particularly in the high-tech and service industries, top management lacks a branding or even a marketing background. The branding expertise rests just below the top line managers. Such companies are often decentralized and have a powerful regional and country line-management system. Effective global brand managers are necessary in these cases to combat local bias and spur unified efforts across countries.
Some global brand managers have sign-off authority for certain marketing programs, but most have little authority. They must attempt to create a global brand strategy without the ability to mandate. There are five keys to success in these situations:
• Companies must have believers at the top; otherwise global brand managers will be preoccupied with 
convincing the executive suite that brands are worth supporting. If there are no believers, a brand manager can try to create them. The global brand manager for MasterCard did just that by convincing the organization to form a “miniboard” of six board members and nominating one to be its chair. That person became the brand’s voice during board meetings.
•   A global brand manager needs to either create a planning process or manage an existing one. To make the process effective, all country managers should use the same vocabulary, template, and planning cycle. This is the first step toward fighting local bias.
•   A global brand manager should become a key part of the development, management, and operation of an internal brand communication system. By traveling to learn about customers, country managers, problems, and best practices, he or she will be able to maximize the opportunities for cooperation.
•   In order to deal with savvy country brand specialists, global brand managers must have global experience, product background, energy, credibility, and people skills. Companies need a system to select, train, mentor, and reward prospects who can fill the role. At Haagen-Dazs, the global brand manager is also the brand manager for the United States, the lead market for its ice cream. The latter position gives the manager credibility because of the resources and knowledge base that come with it.
•   Companies can signal the importance of the role through the title they give the manager. At IBM, global brand managers are called brand stewards, a title that reflects the goal of building and protecting brand
equity. At Smirnoff, the global brand manager is given the title of president of the Pierre Smirnoff Company, suggesting how much the company values his position.

GLOBAL BRAND TEAM
A global brand manager, acting alone, can be perceived as an outsider—just another corporate staff person contributing to overhead, creating forms, and calling meetings. Sometimes adding people to the mix—in the form of a global brand team—can solve this problem. With a team working on the issue, it becomes easier to convince country brand managers of the value of global brand management.
Global brand teams typically consist of brand representatives from different parts of the world, from different stages of brand development, and from different competitive contexts. Functional areas such as advertising, market research, sponsorship, and promotions may also be represented. The keys to success with these teams are similar to those for the global brand manager.
One problem with a global brand team (unless it is led by a global brand manager) is that no one person ultimately owns the brand globally. Thus no one is responsible for implementing global branding decisions. In addition, team members may be diverted from their task by the pressures of their primary jobs. And the team may lack the authority and focus needed to make sure that their recommendations are actually implemented at the country level. Mobil solves that problem in part by creating “action teams” made up of people from several countries to oversee the implementation.
Some companies partition the global brand manager or team across business units or segments. For example, 
Mobil has separate global brand teams for the passenger car lubricant business, the commercial lubricants business, and the fuel business because the brand is fundamentally different in each. A global brand council then coordinates those segments by reconciling the different identities and looking for ways to create brand synergy.
And consider how DuPont handles its Lycra brand. The 35-year-old synthetic is known worldwide for the flexibility and comfort it lends to clothing; its identity is embodied in the global tagline “Nothing moves like Lycra.” The problem for Lycra is that it has a variety of applications—it can be used, for example, in swimsuits, in running shorts, and in women’s fashions. Each application requires its own brand positioning. DuPont solves the problem by delegating responsibility for each application to managers in a country where that application is strongest. Thus the Brazilian brand manager for Lycra is also the global lead for swimsuit fabric because Brazil is a hotbed for swimsuit design. Similarly, the French brand manager takes the lead for Lycra used in fashion. The idea is to use the expertise that is dispersed throughout the world. The global brand manager for Lycra ensures that those in charge of different applications are together on overall strategy; he or she also pulls together their ideas in order to exploit synergies.
When local management is relatively autonomous, it may be necessary to give the global brand manager or
team a significant degree of authority. Doing so can also reduce the chances that the manager or team will get smothered by organizational or competitive pressures; in addition, it can signal the company’s commitment to brand building. 
The team or manager may have authority over its visual representation and brand graphics, for example. In that case, the group or the individual would have to approve any departures from the specified color, typeface, and layout of the logo. Or a global brand team may have authority over the look and feel of a product. The IBM ThinkPad is black and rectangular; it has a red tracking ball and a multicolored IBM logo set at 35 degrees in the lower right corner. The global brand team must approve any deviations from that look. In another example, the global brand manager at Smirnoff has sign- off authority on the selection of advertising agencies and themes.
While companies are spelling out the authority of the global brand manager or team, they must also make clear what authority resides with the country team.
Some aspects of the brand’s management will be firm— the definition of what the brand stands for, say—but others will be adaptable or discretionary, such as the advertising presentation or the use of product promotions.
The job of the person or group responsible for the brand is to make sure that everyone knows and follows the guidelines.