[Podcast] Global Brand Strategy with Jan-Benedict Steenkamp

Are you looking to take a brand to an international audience?

Global expansion needs careful consideration and so if this is you this episode will be packed with value!

We sit down with marketing expert, academic and author Jan-Benedict Steenkamp (or as we know him “JB”!) to discuss his book “Global Brand Strategy: World-Wise Marketing in the age of Branding“.

In this insightful episode, JB walks us through the COMET framework and the components of which are helpful to consider for brands seeking to go international or for brands who are already international and need to focus their strategy.

 

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Show Notes

• Global Brand Strategy Book

 

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Transcript (Auto Generated)

Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to this thrilling episode of JUST Branding. This time, we are with Jan-Benedict Steenkamp and we are looking at Global Brand Strategy. So if you run a brand or building a brand that has international aspirations, then this is going to be the podcast for you.

But before we get into the subject, I just want to mention that Jan, or we know him as JB, is an amazing, distinguished scholar. He has, and I’m going to go through some of these accolades. It might embarrass you JB a little bit, but I think our audience needs to know who they’re dealing with today.

We’ve got, he’s an author. He is a Sinox Massey Distinguished Professor of Marketing at the University of North Carolina’s Canaan Flager Business School and an honorary professor at EIASM in Brussels. He is a co-founder and executive director of AIMark.

He has published over 100 articles in academic journals. His work has received over 58,000 citations and to top it all in a recent study, he has been ranked number five in marketing in the world on career long impact. So we’re dealing with a proper expert for everybody today.

We want to welcome you, JB, to the show. Thank you for coming on. Welcome.

Thank you for your kind words and your accolades. You know, you don’t hear them that often when you are in academics, but it’s wonderful to be on your show and I hope we are going to have a nice discussion together.

We definitely are. Although we’ve gone through the accolades, it would be great to know really who you are and, you know, your journey through your academic career. And basically, yeah, just give us a flavor of the background of who JB is and what, I suppose, with an angle on brand, you know, what is your thinking around brand?

Just a 3000-foot-high view.

Yeah. Well, as you can hear from my accent, I wasn’t born in America, where I’ve now been living for 16 years. I was born in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam, and I spent a large portion of my life either in the Netherlands or in Belgium, at the University of Leuven.

And I moved to the US in 2006. Actually, you never lose the accent anymore, but fortunately here, people are used to people speaking with accents, so that’s actually nice. Well, my interest in branding is, to be honest, have you ever encountered a marketeer that doesn’t have some interest, at least, in branding?

It’s really difficult because much of what companies do, what marketeers do, is organized around brands because that is essentially how it is organized in the retail channel, how it is organized also in the minds of consumers. That’s how our knowledge is organized. We think in brands, so if consumers are like that, retailers are like that, firms are focusing a lot of their effort on brands, then obviously, you know, being interested in brands is, let’s say, I think I would have to argue why I’m not interested in brands.

Yeah, crazy people who are not interested in brands. I agree. And they wouldn’t be tuning in to this podcast, right?

They would not be here.

There could be some people that are tuning in to this podcast that are not interested in brands. So, for example, I find, so when I’m working with companies, now, of course, I’m talking with the marketing guys, and I don’t have to talk about brands in terms of why it’s important, but actually, more often than not, when I’m talking to more the CFO and controller kind of people, you know, those kind of people, actually, I really have to explain why brands matter. So I was at one time at a very large company in, let’s say, in an industry, you know, related to things for babies.

And so I was working with them, you know, how to strengthen the brand vis-a-vis private labels, which were really getting strong in that particular product category. And then at the end of the day, I had a meeting with the CFO and it was very pleasant, but he essentially said to me, JB, I hear that brands are really important, but I don’t really, I know it, but can you explain why they really matter for me as a CFO? So in that case, it helped that, you know, my minor was in finance, so I reformulated my brand matter in discounted cash flow kind of model.

So I explained that to him for about 10 minutes and then he said, actually, I get it. This is the language that I get. But so our dean here at the business school, he’s an accountant.

He’s a great man in accountancy, but he is actually honest. He says, I don’t get brands. I know they’re important.

I just don’t get it because they’re not on the balance sheet. So how can something that is not on the balance sheet be important? So I’m with you, Matt, completely.

Brands are important. Why would actually anybody doubt it? Unfortunately, you get out of the marketing suite.

My brother is a retired VP at Royal Dutch Shell. Well, but his PhD is in mechanical engineering. He doesn’t understand nothing about brands because he doesn’t understand why people cannot be completely rational because how can you get a PhD in mechanical engineering if you are not completely rational?

Unfortunately, that’s not what most people that buy Shell products.

You are right there, JB. I’ve got a new client at the moment in research. They’re all brilliant scientists, genius scientists running divisions in this business.

This business is in a huge mess. It’s been going like 100 years. There’s all these divisions as opportunities have come up.

They’ve funded labs and laboratories and research and stuff. All these people are brilliant, but when you say to them, look, but how do consumers understand all of this? How does your audience make sense of it?

They’re like, oh, we’re really confused. For me, I’m like, well, that’s why you need brand. That’s why you need brand architecture, brand thinking, and clarity around this because when you try and present it, it’s a hot mess.

It’s like scrambled eggs you’re throwing around. We’ve got to get some clarity. I think when people understand things on that scale, you’re right, they can get on board, but it takes a little bit of getting them outside of their world and a little bit more, I always would say, into the mind of the consumer, like you just said there, JB.

What do you think about that, Jacob? What are your thoughts on this?

I was going to ask JB’s thoughts on how he actually communicates this simply to these leaders, right? You have all these amazing accolades, but you have to kind of step back and go back to Brand 101 and talk to them, you know, like it’s like the first class. So how do you actually go about that?

Well, it depends on the audience. We as marketers know that you have to adapt your message to the audience. And so if I’m talking to the CFO, I am talking the language of finance.

I’m not talking about mushy kind of things about, you know, consumers have a certain appreciation for brands. They feel good about brands. They have positive emotions.

These guys are not saying this is not true. These guys just don’t understand how it matters to the company. But another way, another setting in which I explain it, a little less much in the CFO, but let’s say two more general people is, you know, I asked the person, have you ever traveled abroad?

Well, most people have. I said, you know, then have you gone to a supermarket? Well, a lot of people have gone there.

I said, you may purchase some products there. Did it take you long? Oh, it took me a long time, you know, it took me actually two, three times as long as when they go to the local local supermarket.

I said, well, the one thing is, you have to understand the layout. That costs some time. I said, but didn’t you notice a lot on the shelves?

What’s there? Yeah, it would say a lot of brands I’d never heard about. I said, and that is one of the functions of brands.

I go to the local Wegmans here and I make decisions very quickly because I know the brands, I know the store brands and I know in which kind of offerings I like. I go very quickly. Unless you really like to spend hours in the supermarket, then actually I do like that because I’m a little bit biased there.

I love to be in supermarkets, look at shelf layout, etc. But this is of course abnormal. So most people want to get in and out.

Same. My wife argues at me, get out of the grocery store. I get two things at 10 minutes, just looking at the labels, the brands.

No, you guys are definitely weird. I’ll just tell you that straight. It’s a professional distortion.

I love that. It’s like a shortcut to meaning, isn’t it? If you understand, you’ve done your work well as a brand builder, because you’re in the mind of the audience that you want to be in and they recognize you and then they purchase the promise or the offering that you’ve been outlining to them in your comms.

I get it. I think that’s a great example.

Actually, Matt, especially when you’re not a techie. For example, I have here, this is the new iPhone 13 Pro, I believe. It’s the big one.

My old one, I’m not interested in cell phones. To be honest, they are not a part of my identity or anything like that. For some of them are, for some of them are not.

But my previous one was an Apple, everything was on the Apple system. I did a little bit of search on, you know, about the different Apple models, essentially looking at some evaluations at the very non-technical level. But they never even considered an Android phone because, I mean, I was happy with the Apple.

But suppose there was no Apple brand on there. How could I have known that this one was essentially in line of the other ones? And, you know, I didn’t buy it for the price because, you know, it was $1,200 or something like that.

I mean, it certainly isn’t cheap. But still, it is something like, you know, when I purchase a new car, you know, I would never, I would not even check out Cadillac and some of you may really like Cadillac. So, I mean, I’m not saying it’s a bad car or something like that.

But it’s not an image of the car that I like. So, I make it very, it’s very quick. So, it makes a lot of things so much faster, makes it easier.

And in a number of cases, a brand also says something about the kind of person that you are. You know, you communicate part of your identity through the brands that you have. However, those brands, these are different brands for different people.

Because for younger people, an identity, a brand identity of a cell phone is, you know, probably a bit more important than, certainly, than it is for me. But on the other hand…

I think you’re absolutely right. And I think it’s very interesting, you know, so obviously brands, super important. They signpost us to meaning.

Sometimes I sort of say to people, look, you know, it simplifies decision making, or at least it should, if you’ve done your job right, you know, from a consumer perspective. Also, just to throw something else out there, you know, if you’re looking for a new job, you know, and at the moment, the power really has shifted into the hands of employees, you know, it’s about, as you say, your identity as well. So again, it’s like, you know, it should short-cut decision-making time because I first of all can select a company that I know will adhere to my values.

But when I’m inside that company, if they’ve done their job correctly to communicate their culture and their values to me, it should help me make quicker decisions that are in line with the ethos of the company. So there’s a lot of things in there, I guess, we could tuck into. But what I’m super keen to do is shift the conversation a little bit more more into this idea of international brands, global brand strategy.

And to do that, I was just going to draw everybody’s attention to JB’s amazing book. It’s called Global Brand Strategy. It’s here if you’re watching on YouTube.

And if you are interested in this, you’ve got to buy this book. I’ll just tell you a quick story about how I came across it. So I was actually working in the Netherlands, funnily enough, JB, with a cohort of companies.

I was actually working with TechNation, which is a government funded organization in the Netherlands. And we had a cohort of 10 scale-ups, tech scale-ups, and they’re all looking to go international. And so I was part of the consultancy advisory board working with these people.

I was actually going to be running some workshops, which I did with them on brand. And I thought to myself, before I do that, I know the principles of brand. I work internationally myself.

But to kind of boost the credentials and the thinking, I thought, I’m going to go and look around, see what books are there on internationalizing brands. And frankly, I couldn’t find that many. But no disrespect to yours, JB, but I saw yours.

I thought, looks really good. I’ll get that one. What else is there?

There wasn’t an awful lot else out there. I bought yours. I read it.

I found it fascinating. So that’s how I came across it. And then after I read it, I thought, we’ve got to get JB onto our podcast.

So that’s just a little backstory for everybody. But what I’d be super keen for you to do is just explain how you came to write that book and maybe just give us a bit of an overview of the book before maybe we can get into some details.

Yeah. So the book was a logical, say, outflow of my activities, because I had been working a lot with companies, started out in Europe, who were many of them were international. Actually, there were also some very large companies, some of them were smaller companies.

And I also, I mean, I taught international marketing. And I was interested in branding. So the issue is that when I looked at really books that were actually covering that, there was hardly anything there.

And let’s say over a period of about 20 years of teaching international marketing, consulting with firms on brands, often on an international basis. I kind of got the idea to kind of write a book about it, to essentially feel that’s what we do in marketing. We fill a niche in the marketplace with a product that we believe in.

I would never have written this book, probably, if there were already, say, 10 books on global branding, because then I was going to say, okay, I may have a particular take on it, but the 11th book, it’s going to be really difficult to make a difference. So I was able to use all that knowledge and I’ve written a number of cases on brands going international. So I took all those pieces together and I started to write the book.

Absolutely fantastic. And it is a wonderful book. And the sort of the sideline is World-Wise Marketing in the Age of Branding.

Do you want to just pick that apart a little bit? What is World-Wise Marketing in the Age of Branding?

World-Wise refers to the fact that you have to be insightful, that the word wise is clear, but the world side has to do is that in a world of nations, of different cultures, of just a lot of differences, to be successful in the global marketplace, you have to have understanding of the global marketplace and of the challenges that it gives you. That’s where the world-wise comes into play. The age of branding is to do with the fact that I’m old enough to remember a time when in Europe, brands were really exploding.

We are talking about say the 60s. Brands are a little bit older phenomenon already in the United States, where in the 30s, brands were really starting to move up. But of course, everything accelerated also in America after World War II.

In Europe, it came a little later. So the explosion of brands came in the 60s and later on. So we now live in the world where actually even if you go to the countryside in Africa, India or so, you see a lot of brands, not as many brands as you would see in the United States, but you see brands everywhere.

So I believe that one of the really the actual principles of our day is branding about everything is branded. Soccer, football clubs are branded. Bananas are branded.

Of course, smartphones are branded. So essentially, what is not branded? So this is really that we live in an age of branding and that age and brands are now a worldwide phenomenon.

So managers have to grapple with the challenges of brands are important. For many of us, the global marketplace is much bigger than the local marketplace in the United States. That’s a little less the case than in most other countries.

But the relative size of the US market versus the non-US, the overseas market has shifted towards the overseas market, meaning that for any country, the overseas market is huge. So how to deal with that? That’s what the title is about.

How to deal with it in a smart way.

I love it.

And I think, just to bring it back down to earth, I suppose with the boom of the internet, if we’re doing a short history lesson, the internet has made all of us international in some degree. I recently moved to a tiny little place called Wales here in the UK, in the countryside, and I work all over the world, and it’s just me. Now, that’s obviously on a micro scale.

Now, you put that in a business sense where you’re selling products. There will be a market somewhere in the rest of the world for you if you want to take your product or your service there. The question is, the internet’s opened that up.

The question is, how can you fulfill that need? And do you even want to fulfill that need? But before, 1960s, as you say, it wasn’t really an option, right?

You could only have your local area and then you’d have to establish, do a lot of work to establish trade internationally. Now, it’s less of a thing. We’re in the global economy.

Quite exciting. So this book, I think, is super relevant to anyone doing business who uses the internet, which frankly is 99.9% of people. So let’s dig into a couple of things because in the, I would say the most useful part of your book, which I found really, really amazing and such a helpful framework to wrap my mind around was a framework which you call the Comet Framework.

And I wondered whether or not you would be able to, or kind enough to, to sort of walk us through that, what it means at quite a high level. So let’s just start quite high and then maybe me and Jacob could come ask some questions and we can drill into each of the sections as we go through.

Yeah, I think I can best explain the thinking behind the Comet Framework with just how it came about. That is, I was thinking about phenomena in the market, which initially I could not understand. That is, if you would ask most people in Europe, is Ariel, Ariel is what Tide is in the US, is Ariel the famous detergent for Pachter & Gamble, is it the global brand?

Most people would say, never thought about it. I don’t know. If you ask people in the UK, Heinz Baked Beans, is that the British brand, a global brand, people think it is a British brand, or they say, well, I never thought about it.

But, so just this is a simple observation. A lot of times, you have brands that are extremely valuable, like, I mean, Ariel is a valuable brand, Pampers is a valuable brand, for example, where actually people do not care or do not know that it is a global brand. So the point is, we know, let’s say many people have argued that global brands are very valuable because, you know, people associate global brands with higher quality, with more prestige, et cetera.

And I’ve done research to document that. However, that cannot explain the very fact that for many brands, people don’t know it or don’t care about it. And they’re still very valuable and they’re global.

So that kind of got me to think about, am I not thinking about global brands in a too narrow way? I am only thinking about, there was a logical position for me as a marketing professor, to think about that the global brand is valuable because many consumers, not all consumers, but many consumers around the world love a global brand because they associate that with higher quality, with more prestige, the country of origin can really work well, think about German machinery, for example. These things are all obvious, but they cannot explain these other things.

Then I started to think and logically think about the issue, why are global brands so valuable to companies? In the Comet framework, I identified five bases of global brand strength. The Comet is an acronym, the C stands for Customer Preference.

Many customers like a brand to be global rather than local. Again, not everybody, that’s why a global brand doesn’t have 100% market share. The O stands for in the Comet for Organizational Benefits.

I came on to that by working with some companies. An example is Zurich. Zurich is a very well-known financial insurance company in Zurich, I mean, obviously in Switzerland.

And the CMO told me, so they rebranded all the local companies that he had acquired along the way at Zurich. And he told me, we don’t think that we can get much more business by doing that, a little bit perhaps. But he said, for us, the real important thing is we have no organizational identity.

Because people were thinking local in terms of the local companies, not in terms of Zurich, which meant that it was very difficult to get any innovation to push through the company, because with a local mindset comes locally invented. He said it was for us impossible as an organization to get anything done. And then you can say, and I say that to people, well, theoretically speaking, you don’t have to have the same brand name to make that happen.

Practically speaking, it’s much easier to have the same brand name, because not only customers, also employees think about a brand name as an organization, the name of the organization. The M in the comments stands for marketing benefits to a global brand. Now, there are multiple marketing benefits, which I detail in the book.

Let me just give you just one example that many of you would know. Say, about 20 years ago, nobody had ever heard of HSBC. Then HSBC came up with the idea to essentially brand the jetways in different cities around the world, starting, I believe, with Israel, with HSBC, and it had a campaign, a point of view campaign, etc.

But that was interesting, because you get a huge cross-national spillover. The tens of millions of people that go through Heathrow that are not Englishmen, that are on the way from, say, for example, from Haldi Duran, where I live, to Hyderabad in India, they pass through Heathrow because there are no direct flights, and they see HSBC. But you need a global brand for that.

You cannot have a local English brand for that, because you would be spending tons of money without capturing, let’s say, the international flow. Now, there are many more advantages, but we can go into that, but I will just give you one. Comet, the fourth is an E, and that actually is among the most important ones.

That is economies of scale and scope. It is if you have a, you can have a globally standardized product without a global brand name. There are a few examples, and those are the exceptions that prove the rule.

It is again, it goes hand in glove, a globally standardized product or largely standardized product with a global brand name. And in a time that everybody is looking to cut costs, this is a great, a very great, great advantage. And the final one, the T stands for transnational innovation.

Few markets are big enough these days anymore to essentially pay for R&D innovation on a local basis. Much of that innovation is essentially has to be done at the global level simply because the R&D costs are so high. Now, these innovations, you can, so you can essentially pool resources from around the world to support a global brand with new products and in the race of continuous innovation, that is important.

But it also helps, and L’Oreal is a great example of a company that leverages local innovations and takes them to a global level under the L’Oreal brand name. A very exciting area where L’Oreal these days get a lot of its innovation in Eastern Asia, especially South Korea, where a lot of skincare developments are going. It’s a hotbed of skincare development.

L’Oreal is there, and it takes the innovations that it finds there in the market that also its local companies are developing because the Korean consumers are extremely demanding when it comes to skincare, much more demanding than most Western consumers are, and it introduces them also in Western markets. So as you see, that’s where the comment comes from. And when you take this bigger picture, I’m still pretty high up there at 10,000 feet or so, if you take this bigger picture, even if L’Oreal, nobody cares that it is a global brand, it can still be extremely valuable because of economies of scale, of better advertising, of being actually technologically leading in the detergent market because of transnational innovation.

Organizational benefits there are a lot less because Procter & Gamble is a house of brands rather than a branded house. And that also gives another point, and then I will stop, is that a brand doesn’t have to be strong on everything, on the combat framework to be very valuable. And that’s what I tell managers, you don’t have to be strong on everything.

But if you leverage none of those factors, there surely is something wrong with the way how you leverage. You don’t leverage the fact that your brand is global effectively. Now let’s look at what you can do.

If your mind’s not blown yet, you know, let’s follow up with some more mind blowing questions. I want to dig into that. So in effect, what we’re saying here is this is a five component framework for people to ponder when they are either going international or they are international.

And so as a strategist, when I came across this, the reason I thought it was helpful was because you segmented these things up so nicely. Because one of the things that we got to think about when we’re going international as a brand is, well, what are we going to focus on? Right.

Which what things will be most useful? And so why I liked it was because it gives me a structure to think, well, as we go international, are we going to focus on on our customer preference aspect? Like, are we going to maybe discuss the country of origin when we go into our new market?

Or are we going to talk about the multiple offices we have around the world? Is that going to become a helpful part of the communication and the brand building from a strategic level? You know, and you could do that with all of the components, you know, organizational benefits.

Are we going to use that in our comms? And are we going to kind of leverage that as a kind of a key area, having the assets and resources spread across the globe? Is that going to become part of our story?

You know, that that that side of things. Same with markets, marketing superiority. I mean, from a brand perspective, you know, the last three, I think, are really interesting.

The marketing side of things, the superiority of that, because people travel familiarity. You sort of started off with a story of if you go into it, I mean, I think that’s really funny. I was in, I don’t know, Future Ventura a few years ago when we were allowed to travel.

And, you know, you go into a supermarket and you buy the brands that you instinctively understand because they’re in your home market. So that is a superior position for international brands when they’re in they’re in places like that. Economies of scale is a classic.

Another one, you know, obviously, you’ve got more money, you’ve got more resource. You can kind of tip the balance. You can crush competition if you if you wanted to be like that.

So there’s a sort of a strategic angle. And the final one on transnational innovation, you’ve been, you know, you’ve clearly sort of demonstrated that with the South Korean story there. So I just think from a strategic perspective, these things are so interesting as the components to think about.

But what I want to do is bring us a little bit down to earth. You know, if we were sort of a smaller outfit, not a already established global corporate, and we were looking to go international, how could we use this Comet framework? Where would the biggest things for us to focus on?

What would you suggest they would be the most useful things to focus on?

Well, I think so in the book, I have a diagnostic test on page 41, which is really developed to be used by managers. And so I think if we’re talking about a smaller brand, which is not international yet, so the test can be used for, okay, let’s now look at, I have a global brand. How am I actually doing?

So that’s one thing. Another thing is that I am going international. Let’s think about it beforehand.

Now, that is something that is a very good thing to do, because let’s say most brands go international without a lot of thinking. They kind of happen to go international and that is a natural thing. But sometimes we have a saying in Dutch which translates into, it is better to think before acting.

And what you can do as an entrepreneur or a smaller company thinking about going international, you use this test to see actually which of these elements do I believe I can use to strengthen my brand. And that is your judgment. I mean, I can disagree with your judgment.

That is your brand. And so are there sources to be used in terms of customer preference? And so would it be possible to use, for example, the very fact that my brand is sold in different parts of the world as part of my branding message?

So, for example, let me give you… I worked with one company, a good friend of mine in China, in the cashmere business and the luxury cashmere. And one of the things that she is using in her communication, both in China, which is still the biggest market, as well as overseas, is the very fact that her brand is also sold in Paris, in London and a couple of those other places.

Let’s say places that give prestige. So places that communicate to people, also the Chinese home market in this case, it is globally available in cities that are famous and that people respect at the top of the game like New York, Paris, London, etc. So that is something that informed her to say, okay, let me go entering particular cities and to use that then, to use this global availability in these prestigious cities as part of strengthening the brand.

Now, she also looked at, we talked a long time about that, about, for example, another issue of, let’s say, the country of origin, China. And there, I’m not going to bother you with long talk, although Kashmir is, China is the main source. It is not currently well known, let’s say, the China angle is not something that is really helpful.

So, but then what you can also look at, okay, one of the things that you have to think about carefully, if you are a smaller company, look at your organizational benefits. And again, I’ve talked with companies about that, and sometimes also with smaller companies, and they wanted to have a different brand in the overseas market. And then we talked about it and he said, you know, you are not a big company.

It is not that you are like Apple or Procter & Gamble. If you have a different brand in different markets, it’s going to be more difficult for you to manage it. You do not have a large staff to manage it.

You really benefit from the same brand. And then sometimes, Matt, we have to really have a tough discussion. If it is a brand name that actually doesn’t travel internationally, should you change the brand name now to something that travels internationally?

Or don’t do it and have another brand internationally than domestically? And that’s often not an easy discussion. And why not?

Because the company is not big, and then you are giving up something. But my point is that it is now better to essentially take the risk. But I understand if some people say, well, the risk is too big.

I mean, that is their decision. I mean, I can help them, but it is their money. It’s not my money.

If it would be my money, I would have done it. And then there are other things, especially in terms of marketing programs. Pooling of money.

Can you think about a marketing campaign, perhaps using social media or so, that can cover different countries so that you can pool the money? So the thing is, and then dependent on is this is something where economies of scale matter. So it depends.

I can tell you, Matt, give me the company and I’ll find to the factors in the sense that any entrepreneur or small business owner that knows the brand, that knows the company well, can essentially take these factors and do an honest test, diagnostic test. It has to be an honest test. Do not be realistic.

How much money do you have? Organizational resources, et cetera. So focus on what is realistically possible rather than what you want.

I mean, I would like to look like Brad Pitt, but then without Angelina Jolie. But unfortunately, I don’t look like Brad Pitt, although my wife is happy with me. I can say, well, I want to be Brad Pitt and feel bad and actually always fall short.

Or I can say, OK, let’s look at what can be done with what I’ve had.

It’s amazing. Jacob also wishes he was Brad Pitt as well. So you’ve got something in common with him, JB.

Yeah.

Jacob, I’ll come, I know you probably got some questions in a second, but I just wanted to mention that survey that JB’s mentioned on page 41 of his book is really interesting. There’s about, what’s there, three, six, nine, 12, maybe 15, something like that, questions, maybe 12 questions. And what you do is you look through them, and they’re based on the framework, and you score your organization around them.

So super helpful for anybody out there who’s looking into this, definitely grab the book. Jacob, you’ve been listening to JB there, obviously go through the framework and deploy some examples. Have you got any sort of further follow-on questions or any thoughts for him?

There’s a lot of questions. I was actually going to ask you, Matt, because you’ve read the book and understanding, well, understanding your understanding of the book. Did you use this framework when you’re working with those workshops?

Yeah, no. Well, frankly, I didn’t. Not because I didn’t think it would be not useful.

I actually used a lot of the background thinking that you put in the book, JB, just to prepare for some talks and stuff that I was giving to this cohort. So I think I maybe mentioned it, but I didn’t deploy it in my typical way because these scale-ups, basically, they were quite early stage. They were only sort of four or five years old and they just got seed money and stuff.

And so they were not quite ready, I actually don’t think, for some of the thinking, the heavy thinking in this. They were kind of literally like at the point where they’re still trying to frame who they were as organizations from a brand perspective, vision, mission, that kind of stuff, like why do we exist kind of questions. But I referenced it for sure.

And I think the other thing I think I referenced was some of the benefits from some of the things that we’ve been talking about, JB, the economies of scale, the pooling of resource, because I think strategically, it just gave them ideas, but I didn’t sort of use it and walk them through it as a process, Jacob.

Yeah, I think that’s what was most useful for me just hearing JB talk was understanding the benefits. If you’re thinking about going global, what lens to look at it through? What’s going to be most useful for your organization?

And I love that point about the cashmere, right? Aligning yourself with these, you know, places that have that prestige. I think that’s a very powerful one.

And that HSBC example, I have a big travel on myself, and I see that everywhere. And that I didn’t know what that brand was. And I like I googled it or something to figure out what it was.

And, you know, funnily enough, you know, just after so much exposure. So, yeah, I get all the benefits. So I was going to ask about, you know, apart from the diagnostic test, is that the first step?

Is that what you’d recommend for any brand that is trying to go global is to really do a test first, figure out what’s going to work best for them, and then move into actually executing?

Well, I would say I would recommend one step before that. And that is before you go international. Perhaps that is the moment to take a step back and take another look at what is the brand really about?

So Matt, you know, you were actually referring to that a little bit, like these startups were kind of struggling a little bit with it. And actually, I had, two weeks ago, I had a meeting with a couple of former executive MBA students of mine that were actually, had developed a brand, but it was still a little fuzzy. And we essentially worked through, okay, what is the brand really about?

Now, one of the questions that I often ask if I’m working with managers, I mean, often I would ask, can you tell me what is really unique, different, what is brand is really about? You know, actually, Jacob, as often as not, I get the response. That’s not an easy question.

I said, I know enough. We have some work to do. Because if, let’s say, the owner has difficulty in elaborating what the brand is about, how will a consumer ever get it?

And so that’s why I introduce in the book the customer proposition. And that is a one-sentence blueprint that defines the target segment, that defines what the category of the brand is, is it the tech brand, is it the food brand, whatever. And what are the key differentiating benefits of the brand?

And why should I, as a consumer, believe you? So this is, I developed that idea in the book. It is a one-sentence where you essentially, the blueprint is in there, you have to fill in the blanks.

And I use it a lot in my executive MBA classes. And the point is, of course, a brand identity is much more than this one sentence. But the brand identity is everything about the brand.

That is not something that you can actively communicate to the market. It’s too much. So what this customer proposition does is this is essentially what you will be communicating to the market.

And why is it useful to revisit this before you go international? Because now, first of all, a lot of managers may not really have done it. So we have to force really about what the brand is about.

But now you have to look at that in an international context. So now you have to look at this customer proposition because that is the heart of a brand. For whom is it?

What is now so different about this brand? If it is Zillian’s brand, we have a great taste. Well, actually, every soft drink claims at least to have a great taste.

That’s not going to be enough. And why should we believe you? Because most people out in the market are sophisticated.

They’re not going to believe if you say, we are the most reliable car in the world. Why? We are the most reliable car in the world.

And we can say from Suriname. Suriname, you know, in South America, we do respect you Suriname. But most people are not going to necessarily believe that the most reliable car comes from Suriname.

No, they don’t even produce cars, so I can say that. The thing is, look at a brand proposition and see whether it has global potential, whether it is globally believable. And of course, you have to use your own judgment because I can easily say, well, you can pay a lot of money to market research agencies to figure that out.

That is very easy, but many of the smaller companies don’t have that kind of money. But that is what entrepreneurs are. They may not have the money, but they do have insight.

You know, if you don’t have money and you don’t have insight, I think then you’re going to be bow-be-filled. But entrepreneurs will have insight. They will have this better understanding because that is what makes the entrepreneur.

And so critically look at that. If you have to believe that this actually, your current brand proposition doesn’t have global potential, then before doing any common test, think because the common test will, any brand will fail if it doesn’t resonate with the marketplace. Think about maybe we have to recalibrate this.

Maybe we have to change some of these things. And that is perfectly doable. But you will find that a lot of brands have in their customer proposition have global potential.

But that to me would be the first step before you take the next step and looking at the common framework.

Thank you. What I think is really interesting as well in that proposition part of the book is that you have five kind of categories of types of global brands. So you’ve got the value brands, the mass brands, the premium brands, the prestige brands, and the fun brands as categories.

And I think that was a really interesting section in the book of helping people think about, well, where do they play? It’s not category led. It’s not function led, but it’s from a consumer’s perspective.

And I thought that was super smart. So folks, definitely check that out. I just think we could talk for ages.

There’s so much information that you’ve shared. But I think we’ll leave it to our readers to buy your book, JB, to find out more. Where can they get hold of it?

Where can they get hold of you? Where can we contact you if we want to?

The book is available on Amazon and other bookstores. Both the hard copy and the electronic version both have their advantages. I still like actually the hard copy.

I think it’s easier to navigate. You can also purchase it at Springer, which is the publisher. Paul Gray, Macmillan, but you know that Merch with Springer.

I think personally Amazon is by far the easiest or one of the other ones like Barnes & Noble. So they’re by far the easiest. I would love to connect with people.

I post very regularly things on branding, on global issues, private label, also on leadership, on LinkedIn. So LinkedIn is the social media platform that I use. So if readers just send in, you know, contact requests to me, I would be, I’m elated to get in contact with people because some people may believe that, you know, academics are in an ivory tower.

And I think some of them are and nothing wrong with that. But that is not me. I love it to connect with people in practice.

Yeah, brilliant. Thank you so much. And we appreciate that.

You know, I think that is so true that what you said, like academics often sit in an ivory tower. But one thing I have noticed about you is you’re out, you’re talking, you’re doing podcasts like this and you’re making some of that thinking available to everybody. So a big thank you from us to you for giving up your time to do that a little bit more.

We really appreciate it. And thanks for all your hard work and efforts, particularly in this book. And I know you’ve got other books that are coming out about leadership, about other things.

So do you want to say anything about those? What’s your most exciting project at the moment?

My most recent book is Time to Lead with a forward by General Holt, who is Assistant Secretary of the US Air Force. And what I do in this book is I combine actually three strands. That is leadership, many marketing people are also leaders.

Any entrepreneur is a leader. But many, I mean, the CMOs, et cetera, there are many leaders. And then marketing, because there are actually a lot of commonalities between marketing and leadership.

There is also detail. And then I take, let’s say, proven people from history to show actually effective leadership. And it is useful to look at history at proven examples, because let’s say, for example, we would be talking about Jack Welch.

You know, Jack Welch, the great man, the manager of the 20th century, while General Electric is for all practical purposes imploded. Or you can look at Carlos Ghosn, the former boss of Renault-Nissan. Well, you know, he’s in hiding because the Japanese legal authorities are chasing him.

Or you can think about Zuckerberg, you know, let’s be honest, you know, are we too happy with Zuckerberg? You know, he should, I think he’s sailing from one scandal into the other one. The advantage of looking at these proven examples is, and as the economist wrote, these proven leaders surely, from history, surely have something to teach today’s managers.

And so that’s something that’s very, very excited about. It also illustrates how essentially how marketing is much, has really can inform other areas as well. So we should not have other people encroaching upon our area.

We should be expanding what marketing has to say to other parts in the company. So any person that’s interested, this book is also available on Amazon, also in Australia and in Amazon UK.

In that far-flung land of Australia, there we are, everywhere. Global, this is what we’re about, internationalizing the brands. Thank you so much, JB, for stopping by.

I really appreciate that and thank you very much. You take care.

My pleasure. Thank you very much.