How insights and emotional storytelling grow global brands

It’s a delicate balance. Brands need to be aware of—and able to act upon—local differences, while also being able to focus on the commonalities between different cultures in different regions. Great brands do both really well.

The first part of that is about understanding culture. Just from a personal perspective, when I lived in India that was obviously very different than where I grew up. But even when I moved from the UK to the US, which at the surface may seem like very similar cultures—they're really very different. I remember how my first meeting in the US felt so disorganized to me. Everybody was talking, everyone was vocal, and it was a lot less structured than I was used to in the UK, which is a bit more hierarchical, where people have an agenda, and you can only speak if you're at a certain level. So that was something to get used to. And I think that applies to brands, as well—the importance of recognizing and being attuned to cultural differences.

At the same time, you want to find commonality between different cultures, and in the end, people are people. We have very similar emotions, ideals, and aspirations in life. And it's appealing to those commonalities that allows brands to really scale globally. The great brands have been able to do that through emotion.

That's where emotional storytelling is really powerful, and often, the power of emotion is what’s undervalued in marketing. There's been quite a lot of research that has been done around that. The most famous example was from the Institute of Practitioners of Advertising (IPA), a very prestigious organization in the UK. They conducted surveys that showed that emotional campaigns are almost twice as effective as campaigns that are purely rational or combined emotion-rational. That is why emotional advertising is so important, especially if you want to connect with global audiences at scale.

There’s a false choice today between data and creativity. The two work together. And there's a number of aspects to that. For one, obviously, data can lead to insights that can spark a creative idea.

Years ago, I worked on a data-driven campaign for a UK-based airline. It started with insights into an audience—a pure analysis of where demand actually was, and where the biggest untapped demand was.

Through an analysis of flight data, we found out that the Indian expat community in the UK flew a lot to India. But our airline client was not getting its fair share of those customers, who preferred Indian airlines because they felt they understood their culture better. This led us to develop an emotional campaign where the hero piece was a five-minute video. We used food and moms to really celebrate Indian culture, and then invited expats to hop a flight and go visit their moms, because everyone should visit their mom more, right? We put the video on YouTube and it went viral, because it struck an emotional chord and tapped into something universal. So, that's an example of how an insight can lead to a very creative and effective campaign.

In addition, there's a huge role for data in driving creative experimentation. If you're clear about what the KPIs are, and if you're rigorous about measurement, you can actually buy creative freedom. I think that's a very exciting space. If you fail, that's okay, as long as you fail fast. With rigorous insights and measurement, you can actually try a lot of different things very quickly.

Given my background, I’m a big proponent of the data evolution, but one downside of it is that marketers often confuse accountability with effectiveness. It's not because you can measure something that it actually works better. The focus on short-term measurement, especially in the performance space, has sometimes led to bad choices, where longer-term strategies are not pursued because you can't measure them as easily. That's a problem that marketing has in general.

In marketing, we operate on the demand side of an organization. On the supply side, you can put money in equipment, and you know what you're going to get back in terms of yields. Marketing doesn't work that way, right? It goes through human decision-making, which makes things fuzzy. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't work.

What’s happened over the last couple of years is that, if you look at brand versus performance, and if you look at the marketing funnel, the middle is hollowed out. It's like companies are actually making a choice between brand and performance dollars, and they've lost track of the connectivity between the top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel—or the beginning of the journey and the end of the journey. That's a problem, because if brand and performance are disconnected, you're losing customers along the way.

In terms of creating that idea of—what we call at Reprise Digital—customer flow for a brand or for our clients, there are really three elements that we focus on: experience, media, and content.

The first of those pillars—experience—is all about removing any friction in the customer experience. So, that is about optimizing owned assets often. Whether that is owned web properties, SEO, or UX—making sure that the customer experience from initial impression to purchase is as frictionless as possible. As a brand, that's probably the first area you should address.

The second pillar we focus on is media. That's where you can really help higher volumes of customers move throughout that experience. That's obviously about deploying your media dollars across all the digital channels in a way that is orchestrated by the journey, as well. It's not just about understanding the journey. It's also about deploying your media dollars differently across channels, and within channels, for each stage of the journey. That is a major area of opportunity for many companies today.

And then the third pillar is content. Whereas media pushes out messaging to consumers, content is what can pull them in by being relevant. To me, those three pillars are key to driving customer flow.