Building and Repositioning Global Brands

I had a great discussion with?Claudia Sestini , CMO of?Gain Theory , a?WPP ?company,?on the challenges of building and repositioning a global brand.

Claudia discusses her impressive 20-year background in media, entertainment, and advertising having led the marketing campaigns at?Paramount Pictures . She worked on iconic shows such as Scrubs, Two and a Half Men, Sex and the City, and South Park.

Check out this snippet from our conversation for Claudia's tips for re-positioning a global brand.

[Me]: Could you share your lessons on positioning a global brand?

[Claudia]: I've had lots of failures along the way, ?I think number one, when you relaunch, reposition, rebrand, one of the important aspects that doesn't tend to get a lot of attention is actually bringing everybody within the business along with you on the journey.

Because if you get that bit wrong, you haven't got your strongest advocates behind you. What I see very often, and I've experienced especially at comedy central is where the marketing team goes off, they do their own thing, they might even be working closely with the CEO and they're creating the positioning, they're doing the research. They get as far down the line as planning the creative and the campaign but they don't take people along with the journey and it comes to the end. This is our new look, this is our new field, this is our positioning, and I think that can be really jarring from an internal perspective.

You have to make sure that everybody is aligned internally across the whole organisation. When I was relaunching comedy central, exactly that happened. We went off, we did our research our qual our quant, we engaged with an amazing creative agency, we then presented the new creative internally probably about a month before we launched, and it completely panned internally, and it panned to the point where we had to pull the campaign and actually redo the whole thing.

You've got the voice of the customer, but one of your customers and stakeholders are your employees and your colleagues. So that was lesson number one, and actually you know since then every rebrand, every relaunch, every repositioning exercise, take people on the journey step by step show them the research. Tell them what the customer is saying, get their feedback in terms of positioning as well.

[Me]: Before we get to number two, are we talking there about making sure you've got a cross section of your organisation that gets a voice in this? Do you hand pick certain individuals or is it a little bit more complex than that?

[Claudia]: You do have to have a cross-section of individuals who are part of the projects and get a voice. However, at each milestone you have to then communicate back to the whole business so that they understand. Your milestones are, what's the customer research telling us? Because otherwise you get to the endpoint and you go, well based on the customer research, this is our positioning, this is our new language etc.

But actually, it takes people time to digest these things to wrap their head around.?If you do that at each milestone, and I don't mean the granular details, I mean the outputs of the research, “this is where we're at with the assets”, and just make sure you're holding people's hands along the journey so that nothing's a surprise internally until the point when you've launched, because then what you want when you've actually launched a new product is for your employees, your strongest advocates, to be flying that flag because they want to not because they've been told to right move hearts and minds.

?? Listen to the full episode here: https://bit.ly/44FJ4U2