David Rubin is the Director of Unilever’s Hair brands, including Dove, Suave, Sunsilk and Axe Hair.

David Rubin is the Director of Unilever’s Hair brands, including Dove, Suave, Sunsilk and Axe Hair. Before Haircare, David spent 8 years on the Axe Brand, launching it into North America in 2002 and building it leading anti-perspirant/deodorant in the US.

What changes are you seeing in your go-to-market approaches relative to the consumer segments you target?

With some of the trends we’re seeing, and clearly the digital trend in general, the consumer is ahead of us as marketers in terms of how we reach them. Just in terms of platforms and the places they’re speaking and want to interact and control, consumers are ahead of us and we’re scrambling to catch up.

And there’s a lot of talk of social media as a platform and as a specific vehicle. But in reality I think that the digital platform is much more of a mindset shift than it is a physical or an actual technological one. It’s figuring out what is this concept of control and consumer choice and consumer input to brands and consumer ownership of brands.

How are you balancing your marketing mix to build a more interactive relationship with the consumer versus more traditional brand marketing and communication?

TV is still important and will remain important for mass brands, like Suave in my portfolio. But we are certainly trying to balance it within the portfolio and do it effectively and efficiently so there is money left for other things like digital. We’re trying to push social media, search and video quite a bit.

In fact, we now see online video as almost the same thing as TV. It’s all one bucket, and whether you put it on cinema or you put it on online video or you put it on traditional network, it’s all the same. It’s one asset that you’re trying to push across, and it’s more of pushing a message.

There is also a huge growth in a very old school kind of environment, which is the store. We really try to make sure that the impression of our brands is not different when one gets the shelf as the message we spend all this money trying to build. Look at Wal-Mart, Target – these places have almost every American in them. In many ways, consumers are seeing our messages there more often than the places we as marketers traditionally spend all our time. So you must make sure your brand experience in store is just as effective.

How do you determine the impact each element of your marketing mix has on sell-through and brand performance?

That’s the $60 million question of course. It’s a combination of science, directional triangulation, and core gut. We certainly are invested in different analyses like Nielsen, marketing mix modeling, other more cutting edge pieces of evaluation. The directional analyses are more like ad hoc studies of individual elements and making sure that each of them are delivering.

And then the third piece is the gut part, which is just trying to instill in our teams that 5, 10, 15 percent of your budget should not have any measurement at all. It’s about building capability for the future, and measurement should not be the criteria for starting. These are the areas where you want to make sure you’ve got a philosophy about being ready for the next thing that comes down the road. For example, if you want to measure the ROI impact of Twitter 18 months ago, you’re probably not going find it. But if you’re not one of the first trying to figure out the space, then you’re going to struggle later when it is available.

Looking ahead, what particular challenges do you need to address as a marketer with a large portfolio?

What Keeps Global Marketers Awake at Night

By Marc De Swaan Arons and
Frank van Den Driest

In this excerpt from their book, The Global Brand CEO: Building the Ultimate Marketing Machine, Marc de Swaan Arons and Frank Van Den Driest reveal the Top 10 challenges that keep global marketing leaders twisting wide-eyed under their bed covers.

The titles, roles and responsibilities of global marketing leaders today vary widely among companies and industries we have studied or worked with. That said, the opportunities and challenges with which these leaders struggle daily are intriguingly similar.

These days, marketing is among the most invigorating, head-spinning and vexing functions in business. With the possible exception of Information Technology, we can think of no other business that has evolved so rapidly over the past decade. Regardless of whether we’re looking at how today’s consumers organize themselves, how the media landscape fluctuates, how brands interact with their users or how new markets and competitors continue to spring up from seemingly nowhere, the marketing function is more dynamic than it’s ever been before.

In our book, 45 of today’s arguably most important and influential global marketing leaders share their experience. Their words and opinions are revealing, inspiring, thought-provoking and – we hope – transforming.

1. Consumers Are Taking Control: No longer can companies depend on the marketing messages they send out or, more critically, presume that consumers will respond to them as usual – namely, passively or co-operatively. Best of luck force-feeding information down the throats of contemporary consumers! Today’s consumers are not only in charge of how they interact with brands; they’re assembling reference points from wherever they wish, whenever they like, and in whatever form they choose. Moreover, they’re leading the pack in, well, packs, calling on the power of the collective to drive down prices and negotiate solutions as needed.

2. The Role of Marketing Within the Organization: Given: Consumers are changing the way they interact with brands. Which means? Well, the need for greater coordination within the company across all touch points becomes crucial. Any organization or brand is only as strong as its weakest touch point. Brands, as we all know, are about trust, and reducing risk in consumers’ minds. Therefore, any inconsistency or below-par delivery of a brand promise can easily bring down the whole house. This means that someone within the organization – generally, a marketer – must be responsible for coordinating across all of these touch points. Where traditional marketing was once mostly outward-facing, this new internal coordination role demands not only crack internal interaction, but often the creation of new roles and responsibilities.

3. Demonstrating the Value of the Brand and of Marketing: Among the knottiest new challenges that keep marketers (and especially global marketers) awake at night, those that involve metrics, accountability and return on marketing investments are prevalent. Today, as spend migrates from push to pull to interactive media, companies can accurately measure results, effectiveness, and ultimately, return on investment. Firms can now even precisely calibrate the success of differing campaigns, messages and even website content. But measurability brings with it its own set of challenges, ranging from responsibility to an organization’s accountability to confront, correct, and improve any and all interactions with consumers. Measurability has unveiled an internal question: How much do you spend on marketing versus all other options?

4. Differentiation: The number of brands that can genuinely boast a hard functional differentiator, or even a Unique Selling Proposition, has dwindled dramatically in recent years. Countless new competitors with no legacy costs to speak of have invaded practically every market, and today offer high-quality, lower-priced alternatives to familiar brand-name products.

5. Transparency & Convergence: No marketer would suggest that we now live in a world of homogenous global consumers. That said, we do see strong transparency across, and convergence between, many markets. More and more companies are succeeding in building brands consistently across borders by appealing to universal needs such as motherhood or the urge to win, or by building brands in new categories that transcend culture. Examples? Apple’s iPhone, Sony’s PlayStation, even Pringles Potato Chips. In a transparent market, if there’s a better alternative solution (or price) to what your brand offers, you can bet consumers will know about it, and in minutes or hours. New global brands are emerging from nowhere, without any national legacy mindset or burdensome infrastructure to hold them back.

6. Brand Consistency across Markets: Among the most fiercely debated of all the challenges facing global marketers today: How much of a centralized brand expression should they exert in each of the company’s markets? Put another way, how do global marketers uncover the ideal (and elusive) balance between showing sensitivity to a brand’s culture and to the culture of each market the brand inhabits?

7. Differing Levels of Market Maturity: Among your charters as a global marketer is to define brand standards and win internal adherence to these same benchmarks. Especially in the embryonic state of a brand’s development, marketers often operate on a short leash. But when a brand has been around the block a few times, it’s actually more appropriate to expand the brand’s ‘circle of acceptability.’ Some of the best global marketing organizations are developing models and tools for framing consistency, clustering markets (if you will), and then allowing flexibility within that framework.
 
8. Clarity on Roles & Responsibilities: Organizational complexity often conspires to undo and derail strategic intent. To avoid this, teams need to align themselves across time and space, roles have to be clearly defined, and attention must be paid to developing well-coordinated handoffs among global, regional and local teams. That said, our Leading Global Brands study finds that the above is more the ideal than the norm.

9. Internal Focus and Vanilla Mixes: In many organizations, the very existence of multiple marketing teams at global, regional and local levels creates a huge distraction from market realities and competitive dynamics. Over the years we’ve sat inside far too many global marketing organizations where, on the surface at least, the goal of winning outside in the market was temporarily replaced by the urge to prove the other, e.g., regional or global, marketing teams wrong. What’s even more dangerous – and hard to notice if you’re inside the organization? Surrendering. Slide down that particular slope, and the results emerging out of innovation and communication pipelines will be flat, compromised, vanilla brand solutions that fail to deliver on the full potential of the brand promise.

10. Pockets of Excellence: In any global organization, there are bound to be great country teams that always get programs right … as well as markets lacking in expertise. This is especially true in organizations that lack a traditional protocol for leveraging learning and best practices from one market to the next.

Marc de Swaan Arons is co-founder and chairman of global marketing consultancy EffectiveBrands. He founded the firm in 2001 following a career at Unilever.

Frank van den Driest is co-founder of EffectiveBrands. Previously he worked in executive management roles at BBDO, GfK and the PositioningGroup.