Call it the post-colonial era of marketing.
After
years of ruling their global empires from headquarters in the U.S. or Western
Europe, companies increasingly are relocating headquarters and top marketers
for key brands outside their home borders, often to faster-growing developing
markets. And while expatriate executives often run these operations, many of them
are putting an emphasis on drawing marketing talent from overseas markets as
well.
Take Procter
& Gamble Co., which this year has moved the top general and marketing
executives for brands representing nearly half its global sales to offices
outside the U.S.
For
instance, the global headquarters for P&G's beauty and baby-care business,
including its biggest brand, Pampers, moved 9,600 miles to Singapore from
Cincinnati earlier this year. The global headquarters for the company's
flagship Tide brand and the rest of the fabric-care business headed to Geneva
early this year.
While
the Geneva shift had more to do with the preferences of new Group
President-Fabric Care Giovanni Ciserani, the moves to Singapore were motivated
by a need for P&G brands to be closer to the growing number of consumers in
Asia, said spokesman Paul Fox. He stressed that this doesn't mean Singapore saw
a huge influx of personnel from Cincinnati headquarters -- only about 20 in the
case of each unit, albeit 20 highly compensated and influential executives.
P&G
isn't the only company making such moves.
"We
have important management centers for our brands both in Paris and New York,
but we're seeing more and more marketing teams organized and growing in China,
Brazil, Japan [and] India," said Marc Menesguen, managing
director-strategic marketing at L'Oreal.
"We see that bringing amazing innovation power into the whole
process."
Mr.
Menesguen, appointed in 2010, was charged both with spreading best practices
from around the world more broadly throughout L'Oreal and preparing the company
for a digital marketing future. As he sees it, having more marketers outside
the company's traditional developed-market hubs helps with both goals.
"The
billion additional consumers [L'Oreal hopes to reach in 10 years] will be
digital natives," he said. "We know it."
Many
marketers have long had key business units headquartered outside their home
bases.Unilever,
for example, bases its ice cream business in Rome and Lipton tea in Paris
rather than at corporate headquarters in London, a spokesman said. But
Singapore has become a location for a growing number of Unilever executives; in
fact, the company now has more people based there than it does in London.
An
executive of one packaged-goods company referred to Singapore's nickname,
"Asia Lite," noting that the city-state has a heavily
Western-influenced culture and lifestyle that makes it an easier sell for U.S.
or European executives, particularly those with families.
While
Singapore works as an Asian headquarters, most U.S.- or Europe-based
multinationals are placing their China headquarters in China. P&G has long
operated its Chinese business from Guangzhou, but Shanghai is becoming the
headquarters of choice for marketers serving China, said Marc de Swaan Arons, a
veteran of Unilever and now chairman of the consultancy Effective Brands.
Jiri
Kulik, senior VP of Reckitt
Benckiser's's Latin America operations, noted that RB is focused on putting
marketers in key countries within the regions—such as moving headquarters for
China from Singapore to Shanghai. While he initially ran Latin America from Miami,
he's relocating RB's Latin America headquarters to Sao Paulo.
"It's
very nice living in Singapore," he said, "but you are not close
enough to the Chinese consumer." By the same measure, he said, "I
really struggle being in Miami and being in America trying to sell to a
Brazilian consumer. This is the fundamental reason we decided to make this
change."
Another
good reason for such moves is to reflect the changing global population.
"We are staffing up people in the developing markets and moving much more
talent from the developed to the developing geographies," Mr. Kulik said.
RB's
annual report noted, "Currently we have 36%
of our management focused on the 6 billion consumers in emerging markets,
versus 64% focused on the 0.9 billion consumers in developed markets. This will
shift significantly and we have located our leadership of these areas in the
respective market, effective Jan. 1, 2012, so that we can be even more responsive
to consumer and customer needs and faster in execution."
Johnson
& Johnson has even moved the global headquarters of its baby-care
business from the U.S. to Shanghai, partly because that's where Cindy Lau, the
executive who was named to run it last year, lives.
Packaged-goods
marketers are leading the charge to disperse marketers globally, particularly
in developing markets, said Mr. de Swaan Arons. But he also sees growing
examples of such moves by financial services, pharmaceutical, automotive and
electronics marketers, including General
Motors, Ford and Nokia.
"We
are at a turning point, which I call post-colonialism in marketing," said
Mr. de Swaan Arons.
One
reason is that the quality of marketers available from developing markets
"has improved so dramatically over the past two decades," he said,
while companies also have ramped up global marketing training programs. Those
make the university training that young marketers receive elsewhere less
relevant.
Next
up: agencies. The accelerating relocation of marketers to far-flung outposts is
raising pressure on shops to move offices and staff to join them, said former
P&G global marketing officer, now consultant, Jim Stengel.
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