By The Brand Guy
I recently had the opportunity to give a guest lecture on brand management.
The Q&A session gave pause for thought. The gist of the question was this: does the brand need to be exercised centrally, or can it be delegated to branches and regions?
I also recently made a poster for a basketball tournament in a small town, somewhere west of Windhoek. I noticed a pair of large banks sponsored, and subsequently did my best to give professional prominence to the logos. I hope that the organization that initiated the tournament holds more in future and attracts more sponsorships.
What I noticed was thar there was no long approval process. Obviously the brand can be decentralized to a degree, controlled from the town or region. But I am also aware that the process of featuring a logo as gratitude can be protracted if central control is too restrictive.
The decisions to sponsor were clearly taken based on local interests. The managers saw the opportunity and used it. Their benefit is local brand awareness. If it was centralized from the head office, the decision process would probably have been delayed to the point where the tournament would have gone on without at least one sponsor.
Yet it is possible to benefit from local brand presence with the centralized brand management function supporting local management, if the setup is right.
Firstly, the central brand manager must recognize the value of the brand in a town or in a branch. People in different places differ from one another culturally and sociologically. For instance a small stock farmer will be a different person from a horticulturalist in northern Namibia.
By recognizing and incorporating the variance, the brand manager has an opportunity to meaningfully build the brand at a local level in ways that are relevant to the local audience. Stop for a moment and consider how this counters content saturation. The variance in messages counters boredom at the local level and uses relevance to build incremental attention gains.
Secondly, the local branch manager needs an own budget. This could likely be the local CSI budget as local events will more often than not have the aspect of CSI. This assumes that CSI is governed by policy. If this is the case, it is worth building a formula for the actual sponsorship vs the allocation for policy.
Thirdly, the role of the central brand manager must be to act as a gatekeeper, ensuring the messaging adheres to the brand standards. The role of the brand manager must be to guide and train, not to control. What is implicit is that the brand manager must have trust in the local manager to identify and implement plans that are suitable for the local area.
Finally, the central brand manager has to operate quickly and flexibly. There is no point in acting as a stop sign, holding rigid control, and blocking messaging that could create opportunities for exposure. In fact, speed and flexibility could conceivably be part of the brand manager’s KPIs.
If the brand manager has a track record of holding rigid control and delaying messages and presence, this may be construed as insecurity and inefficiency, possibly counterproductive to the brand.
In answer to the question, localization of messages offers distinct business and brand gains. However it needs to be well managed. There is no point in denying an opportunity to grow locally.
*Pierre Mare has contributed to development of several of Namibia’s most successful brands. He believes that analytic management techniques beat unreasoned inspiration any day. Reach him at contact@pressoffice7.com if you need thought-leadership, strategy and support.
