Global Brand Management: How To Manage Global Brands

Selling products internationally allows you to reach new audiences, add revenue streams, and set yourself up for long-term growth. The challenge, of course, lies in the day-to-day intricacies of managing your brand in diverse markets around the world.

Learn about the common challenges of a global branding strategy and how to develop a plan that sets your team up for success. Plus, get expert tips from Kristen Pumphrey, the co-owner, creative director, and CEO who took P.F. Candle Co. global.

What is global brand management?

Global brand management is the process of managing a company’s brand in multiple countries. Also referred to as international brand management, its goal is to establish a global branding strategy that maintains a consistent brand identity across markets worldwide.

A solid global branding strategy also maximizes profit potential in each market with a plan for increasing brand awareness, decreasing overall marketing expenses, and reducing the cost of market entry.

Cultural considerations in global brand management

International brand management involves deciding how you want to represent your brand in foreign markets and making sure your business can deliver on its brand promise worldwide. For some businesses, it’s part of a coordinated international expansion effort. For others—including P.F. Candle Co.—the demand comes first. The company’s international presence grew organically out of the traction they experienced on social media and tourist foot traffic to their San Francisco store. But they chose to work with retail partners and distributors to grow their global reach in Japan and China.

Throughout the process, Kristen learned that culture affects how your brand is perceived in a market. “Cultural difference may be one of the hardest things to grasp and can be a business culture shock,” says Kristen. “What works for marketing in the US is unlikely to work in other countries, and business practices may be different."

There are two main approaches to this challenge: localization and standardization. Localization adapts brand materials for local markets, and standardization emphasizes unified branding and messaging worldwide. Although they’re strategic opposites, they’re not mutually exclusive; most successful international brands use both strategies.

As you choose your approach, consider language and visual style, and how much you may want—or need—to adjust these to resonate with customers in international markets:

Language 

Effective translations preserve meaning, voice, and tone while accounting for regional idiom and usage differences. You’ll need to bear in mind that your product names and marketing messaging might mean different things in different cultural contexts, so lean on local expertise to advise.

You might also decide to translate your packaging materials or create a localized version of your brand website, even if you’re selling primarily or solely through a distributor.

You can use a translation service or rely on local partners for help with this. Kristen uses local distributors, who have experience selling to local audiences and are familiar with the P.F. Candle brand. 

Visual style

Visual styles or color choices can also mean different things in different cultural contexts. This is another area where a distributor who understands the market can be helpful, but you’ll need to provide them with detailed brand guidelines and a system to check localized assets are correct. 

“If you work with a distributor, the biggest challenge is how they are representing you,” says Kristen. “You need to provide a lot of assets—photos, design guides—and double-check the work to ensure it’s a proper representation.”

How to build a global brand management plan

1. Know who you are
2. Conduct local market research
3. Audit your brand presence
4. Establish market groups
5. Vet your strategies
6. Define your global brand identity

A global brand management plan protects your brand image, maximizes the benefits of selling in foreign markets, and can even help you vet new markets for entry. Here’s how to create one for your ecommerce brand:

1. Know who you are

Your brand isn’t its name, logo, color palette, or even its products or services. All of these things can vary between markets without damaging your credibility or diluting your brand image. What can’t change are your mission, vision, and values—and that’s true whether you sell around the world or just on your own block.

Start by revisiting your:

• Mission statement. Your mission statement tells new customers what to expect from your brand. It also provides your employees with direction, inspiration, and focus. What is your business setting out to achieve and why? 

• Vision statement. Your vision statement articulates where you aspire to be once you achieve your mission. What’s the long-term goal of your business beyond making a profit? 

• Brand values. Your brand values guide how your company operates. How do you source your products, deliver on promises to customers, or treat your employees? Brand values inform how your business operates and fulfills its mission.

Update these pillars as needed so that they accurately represent what you stand for and where you’re headed. These will guide your approach to international brand management. 

2. Conduct local market research

Dive into the research on any new markets under consideration and map out key data points about the target audience that will inform your branding decisions for each. You can start with familiar market research strategies like reading trade journals or interviewing customers. Kristen recommends leaning on local partners for help. “You can read articles or search the internet, but this is where an agent or distributor can really come in handy,” she says.

Assess if your brand ethos and creative will resonate with customers in those markets, or if you may need to make adjustments. You can also frame up your company’s philosophical position on localization as part of this step. P.F. Candle Co., for example, prioritizes standardization wherever possible.

“We are lucky that many of the countries that export us are really interested in the California lifestyle, so they buy into the content and brand identity we’ve already created," says Kristen.

3. Audit your brand presence

If you’re already selling internationally, assess your current brand presence by performing a multimarket brand audit, starting with your local market and repeating the process in every market in which you operate. Here’s a list of questions to ask yourself as you go:

• Is there brand consistency within this market?

• Are the marketing strategies and brand assets my business uses in this market consistent with my larger brand image? 

• Has my team developed a localization strategy for this market? If so, do current practices align with the written strategy? 

• Do localized practices correspond with my larger brand strategy? Which elements differ? 

• Is this the best approach based on local market research findings? If not, do local research findings or performance data suggest that my company might benefit from a more localized approach to branding and marketing strategies? 

Take note of any inconsistencies or areas for improvement. 

4. Establish market groups

International brands increase efficiency by grouping markets with similar needs. Here’s how to develop market groups:

• Define local strategies. Use your research to define the bare minimum localization efforts necessary to compete in each of your target markets. You might decide that you only need to translate your website, for example, or that you need to localize product and service descriptions and pricing structures.

• Group target markets. Create target market groups with overlapping characteristics such as region, development stage, or any other factor relevant to strategic branding and marketing practices. A company that sells outdoor gear, for example, might group countries by language, climate, or terrain. 

• Outline group strategies. For each group, define a strategy that meets the bare-minimum localization needs of the relevant markets. If this is difficult, you may need to restructure your groups or even reconsider the markets you’ve chosen.

5. Vet your strategies

Compare group-level strategies to your available branding and marketing resources to determine if your team has the bandwidth to serve the markets you’re considering. If you’ve taken on too much, scale back by eliminating markets or groups.

You can also use market groups to evaluate efficiency. If a current or potential market has distinctive localization needs, decide whether to focus elsewhere or proceed with a one-country group based on the market’s potential. 

P.F. Candle, for example, keeps its social streamlined with one main account per platform. “We try to run one main social media account rather than having diverging accounts,” says Kristen. “I think it’s important for content to be pretty streamlined so you can also see the customer feedback in one place.”

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A post shared by P.F. CANDLE CO. (@pfcandleco)

It makes an exception, however, for Japan. “The distributor we’ve worked with for over a decade uses our existing content and his own to represent us in the language of the area,” Kristen says. In general, businesses only create one-market groups when a market’s anticipated revenue offsets the cost of a market-specific strategy.

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A post shared by P.F.Candle Co. JAPAN (@pfcandleco_jp)

6. Define your global brand identity

Once you’ve locked in your list of markets and market groups, identify the messages, practices, and assets that are or can be consistent between group strategies and review the results. These are all potential elements of your global brand.

If you’re not happy with the results, you can return to previous steps and make changes. If you want a consistent visual style across markets, for example, you might go back to step four; identify the groups or markets driving the inconsistency, and either standardize your local approach, remove the outlier markets, or rethink the importance of consistent global visuals. Remember that mission, vision, and values are non-negotiable. If your global brand contradicts these, opt for standardization or market exclusion.

When you’re satisfied, draw from your list of consistent elements to create global brand guidelines for your company. The specificity of these guidelines will depend on your approach to localization: If you’re planning for highly localized strategies, your global brand guidelines might include only mission, vision, values, and primary color palette. If your brand is more standardized, your global brand identity might define everything except for the language in which you communicate with customers.