As a 30-year veteran of the Animal Health and Nutrition industry, I have been respon­si­ble for over 100 global marketing and inno­va­tion projects. Here, I’d like to share my ideas on the success factors behind global B2B brand campaigns, espe­cial­ly my thoughts on launches.

All the suc­cess­ful global B2B brand campaigns I’ve worked on have three aspects in common: 

• They focus on the winning insight; 
• There is con­sis­ten­cy across different channels and geo­gra­phies; 
• They involve “concerted execution”.

No single indi­vid­ual, not even the most brilliant one, can achieve this alone. Teamwork and concerted effort are required. So the question is: How can I/ how do we establish this team and make it work? A few important steps, in the right sequence (as shown here), make all the dif­fer­ence:

• Recruit team members with a col­lab­o­ra­tive mindset, rep­re­sent­ing all relevant stake­hold­ers. All stake­hold­ers in the company/business must feel rep­re­sent­ed by the team and the team needs to reflect this! This can mean functions, sub­seg­ments and geo­gra­phies.
• Team members must fully commit to the team and its work, and feel ownership of the result.
• Diversity of the different markets must be rec­og­nized, resulting in a 360^o overview of all relevant aspects.
• Find the winning insight, the cor­ner­stone of the campaign.
• Build com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools around this winning insight.
• Execute the launch plan in a concerted way. By concerted I mean that there is a focused direction globally but that the countries/regions involved have some latitude in how they get to that clearly delin­eat­ed end point. 

Once the plan is ready and the tools are available, it all about execution!