67. Why Globalocal marketing’s the right approach

You're listening to Unicorny and I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Welcome to part two of our foray into field marketing. Field marketing is where it gets real. You're no longer doing it at arm's length. It's where you go belly to belly with your actual customer. So it's probably the bit of marketing where you learn the most. And we're really lucky to be talking to a proponent of the art, Maya Price. Maia is a veteran of field marketing with global giant SAP. In part one, we discussed the real power of field marketing proximity to your customer, and how that insight can help drive a true out to in marketing model. That's one designed around what your customer actually wants. In part two, we're going to open up the great debate in field marketing events. Standardization versus customization. Global or local, uniform or unique, repeat or refresh?

Just what are the rules here? And what are the bigger implications for your whole approach to marketing? Let's go and ask Maya.

So the question is, how do we find the right balance between standardization, customization or even personalization? Because for field marketers, that is where the rubber hits the road. So how do you decide which elements of the customer experience are to be uniformly implemented worldwide, and which aspects should be finely tuned to echo the local vibe? So let's start out by taking a quick look at the benefits and drawbacks of both standardization and customization. Maya, we touched on this in the first half of this show, but help me out, what are the pluses and minuses of both? Standardisation. Customization.

From a standardisation point of view, especially working in a global company, no single country is arrogant enough to think that everything they do is completely different. At the end of the day, we sell the same products, we go out with the same message, we're talking about the same things. So the standardization happens on that scale and on that level of what are we trying to say? What do we need to get across? What is our message? The localization comes in with a nuance of does that message resonate exactly that way, or do we need to tweak it slightly because of the specific market, because of the culture, because of the experience, because you're in an emerging market, because you're in a mature market and all those sort of things. So I think that's where the differences and the similarities come in.

The big plus of standardization is we're in a reality today. We are constantly being asked to do more with less. And I hate that sentence, do more with less. My biggest change would be, do different with less, because you can't do more. You can only stretch yourself so far. You can only stretch your people, your budget. It can only go so far. So you need to think about how do you do things differently and how do you put brains together and resources together and things together to make life easier for everybody. What we've seen is when we don't standardize, we end up with very similar messages, but it can be a little bit confusing for the customer because they're hearing slightly different messages that are more or less the same, but not exactly the same. And we are trying to sell the same message.

We are trying to say the same thing. So why not take that breather and go, great, somebody has created that platform for me. I don't need to do that. I think where the resistance comes in and where the localization bit comes in, people mistake localization for the heavy work of having to do things themselves. So when we talk about standardization, we can have standardization of message, but we can also have standardization in terms of tools, in terms of templates, in terms of, this is the look and feel when you're running an event. This is what your stage look like when you're sending out an invitation. This is what the registration page needs to look like. And then some people will go, well on a local level. Well, really, then what's my job?

And I'm just, am I just then a glorified events manager who's looking for venues and booking catering and food? No, actually, before you would have had to spend hours creating your own template, setting up your own registration page, looking for images to create the website. This has now been taken away from you. You can now focus on the real customization of. Okay, what else can we bring into the agenda that's very local? How do I work with my sales team to get the right customers there? How do I build a better relationship with the customers? The things that are really going to make a difference to an event or a campaign. So we're actually freeing up local time to work on the very specific things that are going to make a difference.

So I'm hearing here the spectrum we talked about in the first half of today's show. At one end you've got efficiency, and the other end you've got effectiveness.

Absolutely.

So the standardization, the global bit gives you efficiency because you've tried and tested, you've got learning loops. All the content you've got is being constantly evolved and improved. So you get speed and efficiency from having, it's like the, here's one I made earlier approach correct, and then locally the customization is going to deliver that effectiveness because they know people better. So there's almost like a platform that can be delivered by central or by global, and then the showstoppers are delivered locally.

Absolutely. And I think the most important thing is to have the consistent feedback loop of this is effective, but it's actually not efficient, and vice versa. And this is really efficient, but it's actually impacting the effectiveness because there is also a worry that you go so much into standardization that you completely lose the effectiveness. And for anybody who sits in global, the reality is you're creating something for the whole world, so you're not close enough to it to know that it is actually effective. You need that feedback from the ground to let you know what's working and what's not working.

So how do you decide which bits.

Of your activity you're going to standardize globally and which bits you leave to adapt locally?

I think it's a constant test and learn. You probably will start with everything needs to be standardized, and then where is the pushback? Where doesn't it make sense? You create a skeleton of everything, and then you ask for the feedback, does this work? Does that not work? And then it becomes balancing the scales. Do we need to be 80% standardized? And sometimes I think we're such perfectionists that we also forget that a lot of the time good enough is good enough, and a lot of the time we hold back of sending things out of doing things because what if it's not 100% perfect? And we have to have speed in here as well because things are just happening at such speed today anyway, and we've got to keep up. Yes, the pushback on the localization needs to be, but this won't work.

But is it okay? Is it good enough for now? And also the balance is, what is more important is, you know, we also, we create a lot of tools that we want people to use that are standard because the tools help us track the data and do the right thing so that we can, in the long run, serve the customers more of the right campaigns and that maybe on the ground somebody will go, I can't use the tool because it doesn't give me what I want. And it doesn't create the right customer experience on the day, at the event. Then you need to balance and you need to, what is more important, to have the experience on the day or to have the data in the system so that you can have an experience long term?

It would be fantastic if we can somehow do both. But I think there is a little bit of give and take and a little bit of I'm leaning in a little bit more here, but I expect you to lean in at other parts of the business as well.

The good is good enough thing, I think is really important to remember that actually we don't do events for ourselves, we do them for our customers. And our customers perceptions often of the things that we are doing are very different than ours.

Absolutely.

And also that if you like the final mile or whatever, that last bit that we obsess over often can be the really expensive stuff that they honestly don't give a monkeys about. So I think that's a really good takeaway that we always just catch ourselves on a little bit and just think, actually, is this going to work for my customer? If it is, stop doing the work and just let them enjoy the experience. The other one I love is you say you hate the way that thing more with less. I also really hate it, and I hadn't heard different with less before. What I never understood about it is we're doing things because we're expecting an outcome, not because we're creating an output. So more with less assumes you're just going to make more stuff. You need to make more stuff, but.

You can't spend as much doing it.

Actually, if you think about it, if the stuff that we're working on is working, then why would we do less of it? It just doesn't make any sense.

Right.

Different with less, I get that is your budget is fixed, you don't have anything else you can go after. But more with less doesn't make any sense at all.

I think sometimes people also forget about optimizing what you already have. So we have a lot of campaigns, we have a lot of events, and then somebody will come from a part of the business and go, we need help in this area, we need more pipeline in XYZ. And what often will happen is everybody panics and needs, we need to do more. And they don't stop to go, hang on, let's look at what's already working. Should we rather put more into that and let that machine carry on and produce more? The panic is always, we need something new, we need something different, we need to create from scratch as opposed to let's optimize what we already have and have that working even better for us.

It's more interesting to do new, shiny stuff. It's not always more effective and not.

Even only for us. Sometimes it's more interesting for our stakeholders. They want to see something shiny and new and different. It's boring to say, oh, remember that campaign we did that went so well, we'll just carry on with that.

Here’s my take on this Unicornies. Don’t reinvent the bloody wheel. I see it time and time again and im sure you do too. And honestly ive been guilty of it. With every new ask we try to come up with a new answer, but the reality is we may already have the answer. So the skill is then about diverting effort to maximize that answer. Or in the case of an event, use the things that already exist so you can focus effort on adding local colour. I really like Maya's efficient and effective thinking. Create efficiency by using what already exists, like messaging, templates, stage design and so on.

This in turn helps you be really effective when it comes to localizing the event because then you have more time to find the right local speaker, more time to make sure the right local customers are going to be there, more resource to create a follow up program for the leads you identify, and it goes on. All of this makes total sense. No shit Sherlock. I hear you cry, but it's worth calling out because it's almost become counterintuitive to think like this. We're so wired to produce the original these days. We put so much value in new every year. For example, marketing departments kick things off by asking something what are our five big wins going to be this year? Or what's the strategy for the big conference this year? Well, hang on. Did we achieve last year's big wins? Has the business changed?

Have the customers asked for something completely new? Do they even understand what it is we do and why we exist? My guess is the answers to those questions, more often than not, is no. So why the hell are we starting again? Instead, the question should be, what did we learn from last year? What aspect didn't resonate with our customers? What did? How can we improve it? Where should we focus efforts? And we shouldn't worry if that means developing an idea or approach that already exists. On the contrary, we should feel good about it. It justifies the work we've been doing. It means we're on the right track and we're now refining things. It means we're spending money on improvements, not wasting money on do overs. So next time somebody gives you that bloody stupid line, we've got to do more with less.

You can say, no, we don't. We've got to do more with what's already working. Ok, let's get back to Maya. We've heard theory of how to go about standardization and customization, but what's it like in reality? What happens when you face resistance? How do you work with a local team when they really dig their heels in? Let's go straight back to the studio and find out.

So we've talked about scaling, we've talked about moving from regional to global. We've talked about some of the challenges of standardizing versus customizing at local events and maintaining the brand consistently. In theory, that stuff's all great. In reality, of course, and I think we've hinted at it doesn't always go so smoothly, and I've seen it myself in my own career. I want to talk about some things that are slightly stickier. So we're going to have to agree right now. Let's talk hypothetically, and let's talk about best case or best practice, not specifics.

Okay?

Otherwise I have a feeling you're going to go, I'm not going to tell you that. So I want you to think now about your whole experience, not just your experience in the role you're in. Because one of the things that is really hard is when you're trying to get something done in a region or a subsidiary or an area, and you get that knowing look and they go, well, what you need to understand about.

My fill in the blank, whether that.

Be country, local region, is dot, dot, it quote s not going to work and you have to make it work, which is going to need a blend of diplomacy, probably, and determination. So when someone's facing that, if any of our unicorns have this issue where they're trying to encourage local teams to take the medicine, what's the best practice? What's the best way to approach it?

I think there is a balance between you need to walk as fast as the slowest person, but you also need to find your fastest people and trial some things with them. There is resistance to change. I think that's just normal human nature. But you do get people that thrive on change in every team. So you need to identify those, whether it's a person or whether it's a country or a subsidiary, and trial and pilot certain things with them. People enjoy latching onto success as well. So if you trial something and it's successful, it's a much easier sell. And yes, you'll still get that. Okay, well, I know it worked in that country, but it's not going to work in my country. But then you have the conversation of, okay, tell me why not?

And let's mitigate those risks where you think it's not going to work. So rather than just saying it's not going to work, I'm not going to try it at all. Give me the specifics of why it isn't going to work. And is that a blanket? Overall, it doesn't fit into anything. Or actually, now that you've given me the specifics, we've identified that 60% can work, so let's work together on the 40% that you feel doesn't work and where we need to localize and make those changes. And I think then over time again, you build that trust of, oh, they've actually proven to me that some of it will work. Maybe I won't be so resistant next time.

Yeah. It sounds to me like you got a very consensual style of leadership.

Yeah, I do.

I picked that up in the very opening of the last part of this show when you talked about an approach being, rather than putting a whole program in place. Let's look at the bits that are going to be accepted, the common pieces first, and start there. And note itself that when I've got a difficult initiative to push through or something, I want to push through. Look for the common bits first and communicate those first. And as you've just said, then it becomes almost negotiation over the rest of it, rather than a mandate or an edict.

The other important bit is to really get people involved right from the beginning. Nobody likes being told what to do. Nobody likes being told, well, we've decided that in your country or in your region, you have to do this now. Just go and do it. It's that lack of control. People, again, human nature, like to be involved. They want to give their feedback. They want to feel like they're being heard and being understood. Being heard doesn't mean I'm going to do exactly what you say. But I've heard you. You've heard me. Now let's find the consensus.

Standardizing and templating we talked about it's a really good approach to building efficiency to get some speed and to allow the space to create value adding work. But sometimes when you're doing that, especially if you're trying to monitor something centrally, there's a risk you create an administration layer. So I'm interested to hear how you monitor and control what's going on without having to create specific resource just to monitor it.

I think this is where the help needs to come in, that when you're creating something that's standardized it has to come with your standardizing the way and you're providing a way to monitor it and to, you can't just here we've provided standardization, now you go and figure out how it works and how to monitor and come back and feed it back to us. The model of standardization has to come with a standardization of tools, with the standardization of reporting with a help there. Otherwise you're just creating more work on the ground and frustration on the ground for somebody to go oh, they've given me the standardisation, but now they need me to figure out myself how I report it back to them, whether it's working or not. And also what happens is every single campaign, event, country, region will report slightly differently.

They will report on different KPI's, they'll report on different targets, they'll report in a slightly different way. And you're trying to see whether the standardization is effective or not. But you've got 25 different types of reports. One's an infographic, one is an Excel spreadsheet, one is a tool and a dashboard that someone's pulled. And there's no standardization there. So if you're going to create standardization, it has to come not just with the templates and the campaign, it has to come with the follow up, with the pre, the during and the post and the follow up and the reporting and the tools has to be part of that standardization.

Okay, that's a great takeaway note unicorn us build your reporting mechanism into your templates. We touched on this, I think, a little bit earlier. Consistency mustn't stifle innovation or creativity. As a leader, how do you communicate and encourage people to take license to.

Increase effectiveness locally, using the time that you've got and going back to what we've said earlier, allowing people the opportunity to fail and saying failure is okay. Failure is not failure, it's a learning so that people have the safety to try new things. But also if I look specifically at some of the campaigns that we're rolling out globally, they started off as a country campaign. Okay, so nobody is under the illusion that everything that is created as a standardization happens globally. We depend on the creativity of the different countries to then look at, oh, this worked really well in Belgium. Let's see if we can trial it in a few other countries. And does it work just as well in other countries, whether it's an emerging country or a mature country? And if it is, let's then take that and roll it out globally.

So I think we have a history of showing that creativity does happen on the ground. It doesn't just come from a standardised kind of agency putting something together. What we feed our agencies is often the work that a small team has created on the ground. And that builds a huge amount of pride as well in the local team to say, hey, look at something that we've created that we put our heart and soul into, that we know was effective, that our sales team loved that, created great awareness, or created great pipeline, and now it's been rolled out globally. There is huge kudos and pride in that as well.

And I bet it gives a nice bit of gamification there because some of the other regions are thinking, hey, look at what they did.

That's a danger as well. I hate the word best practice because that competitiveness, oh, show us your best practice. And then what happens is every country goes, oh, they had a best practice, I better come up with my own best practice. So instead of adopting what somebody else did, they're now thinking, I've got to do my own thing. It's a balance of, here's something somebody else created that really works. Now, how can global help you to roll it out? So it becomes a standardization, and at the same time, let's continue talking to the countries to find out what they're doing on the ground and see if we can pick up even more of these. How do we balance that out?

Yeah, it's got to be fair. I wasn't going to use another dirty word, artificial intelligence, but I don't think.

You can't get away from it.

No, you can't get away not possible. And I bet you're using AI tools to help you in being more efficient, standardizing all sorts of other ways. What are you doing that you can talk about?

I think we're currently looking at user cases of what can we do? And I think it's a two pronged approach. There is from the customer experience side, what are we doing when we're running an event to create a better customer experience, whether it's helping customers to procure their own agenda, whether it's giving them a really cool experience on the day, what are the things that we could be doing on the other side? And we go back to that dirty sentence of doing more with less. We've got limited resources. How can we use AI internally to create an employee experience, to actually help our employees and our teams to run more efficiently, effectively and have a little bit of fun, to find ways of working within their teams to make their lives a little bit easier? So we want to do both ideally.

And are you playing with language models as well as what types of technology?

Yeah, because the language models, of course, that's where the localization comes in and that's where it all fits in together. And, you know, we have limited budget of localization in terms of languages. We don't want to focus only the top ten. We want every country to be able to feel like they can localize a language, localize a look and feel. And that's where I think AI can really help us there.

Because you are truly global. I mean, you must be in every country in the world, practically.

Yes.

It's a scary number. Just thinking about short translation. I've been playing with eleven labs. They've got some translation. You can clone your own voice. People wouldn't know this, but often in an episode it's not me, it's my clone, where I need to overdub a piece on the move. I've built an AI that will do it and it sounds literally just like me. But you can also translate it simultaneously into one of 32 languages.

Right.

And it's used for video, for YouTube dubbing. So bottom right hand corner, we don't use it for that, but it's extraordinary.

To hear that's where the part of is it good enough is going to come into effect. Because I remember way back when I was working in Africa and we worked with Portuguese. Africa, which is so working with Angola is very different to Portuguese. Which part of the world Portuguese it comes from. You have different parts of Portuguese and there was a pushback. We can't send this out. It's not 100% correct. Is the person on the other side going to be insulted reading that, or are they going to understand that it's good enough and the AI will learn the more you feed it? That's the whole point of AI. So let's start somewhere. If we don't start and wait for it to be 100% good enough, we're never going to get there.

Language is an interesting one because it's easy to get sniffy about something that's not well translated.

And you do get the person in the country is very protective over it. Rightly so, absolutely. But that's where you need to trust the country. They will know whether this is going to be. If you look at, you know, when I, working in the UK, how often I have to say putting a z instead of an s is going to upset some people. It really is. Is it just us being overprotective or is it really necessary?

So, ma, thanks very much. Let's give our Unicorners something to take away. So your experience recently of moving into this new global role and taking a completely fresh look at how you handle field marketing and all the things you've talked about, customization, standardization, localization, if there's a starting point that our listeners could think about something, that you would be able to advise them, to help them in improving how they go about doing their field marketing, what would that be?

Firstly, listen, don't assume. Make sure that you go out and you're getting different opinions, you're getting different views, you're talking to as many people as possible, because then you're building a community. Who's going to work with you to make a success as opposed to trying to figure it all out on your own. Nobody in any world is expected to know everything about everything. And I think moving into a new role and trying to bring things together, there isn't an expectation of me to know everything, but there is the expectation of continuous learning. And I think that is the one biggest takeaway I can really say. I've been at my company for a really long time, and in the last six weeks in my new role, I have probably learned more than I have in, which is fantastic. I'm loving it, and it's really invigorating.

I have a great saying that I love, and it is if you think you're the smartest person in the room, you're probably in the wrong room. That's the continuous learning for me that I take away.

Thank you, Maya. And that brings us to the end of part two. What I'd like to do now, just before you go Unicorners, is draw out the main thing I learned across both parts of the show. And by the way, if you didn't catch part one, please do go and listen to it. I promise you it's 30 minutes of your time very well spent. Now, what impressed me the most, and I think I learned something new here, by the way, was Maya's willingness continuously to improve. Sure, that was the thought she left us with just a few moments ago, continuous learning. But that approach shows right through our discussion, and none more so than when she talked about going local again.

After you've worked your way up to a global role, going back into a regional market, getting close to the customer again and learning from them again sounds fair enough. But it's totally contradictory to the way we actually do things, because to progress, to climb higher up the ladder, we have to take on greater and broader responsibility, right? Not move in the opposite direction and reduce our remit. But the danger in climbing higher is we become detached. We get so far from the customer that we actually learn less. In fact, we probably just become set in our ways, stuck with what we took from our final learning moment. And our life then becomes more about how we politically navigate the system in order to get that thinking executed by those around us.

And that is a symptom of an in to out business, where the leadership is pushing an agenda no longer built on what the market's looking for. But Meyer's approach about individual continuous learning is actually a good one for the whole organization. It can offer a solution to the problem, a way to progress as a leader while staying in touch, even a way to become a fully fledged out to in business. For instance, in part one, we discussed the need for openness and trust in the way we give and seek out information at an individual level, but also at a company wide level. This kind of dynamic feedback can ensure leaders don't get detached from the customer by continuously asking and looking for what the field, marketing and salespeople are seeing and hearing.

Leaders keep learning, they keep improving their strategy, and the company keeps developing. This is a theme we picked up on in part two, the importance of constant development over change. You know, we all gravitate to shiny new things, and I think many leaders feel duty bound to come up with something new each year, something to prove their worth, a new direction. But that's as bad for an organization as changing its leader on annual basis. The key is constantly to review, to be brave enough, constantly to ask what's working with the customer, and constantly then to adjust, not change. This approach works for everything, from the events we run right up to the overall strategy of the entire organization. As Maya showed us, this saves time and money, and it increases effectiveness. And that is what we are being asked to do all the time.

Of course, the way we hear this ask is different. Like Maya said, she is sick of people telling her to do more with less. No one can do that. But if we are prepared continuously to learn, then we can do more with the things that are working for us and we can spend less time and less money on the things that aren't. Now, wouldn't that silence a lot of smart arses? Just before you go, please do one small thing for me. Hit subscribe. It's so easy, but so impactful. Because as our subscriber numbers get bigger and bigger, well, so do we. And your pod then just appears in your feed. It's that simple. So subscribe. You have been listening to Unicorny. I'm your host, Dom Hawes.

Nichola Fairley is the series producer, Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant, Pete Allen is the editor, and Peter Powell is our scriptwriter.