A purpose-bred roadmap: Growing Sri Lankan brands global
There are no Sri Lankan brands in Interbrand’s Best Global Brands table – yet. There are a fair number of global Sri Lankan businesses, but they haven’t been able to establish themselves as global brands so far. To understand why merely growing the size of their global business will not realise their corporate aspirations of being admired as a Best Global Brand, it is useful to understand what truly global brands deliver today.
Having begun with the Age of Identity, the world has swiftly moved through the Age of Value, Experience and the Age of Experience, and now thrives in the Age of You. The future thinkers of the world have spoken about it as Globalisation 3.0 or the Cognitive Era, where, after the Reigns of Empires and MNCs, it is now the individuals that rule.
So, it is the individual-led era where people with high cognition are in the controlling position, and they are clearly using brands to design their lives. Given this new expectation from brands and the accelerating pace of change all around, it’s up to brands to move at a new speed. At Interbrand we call it the Speed of Life. While the brands confined to local geographies may still have some borrowed time to remain impervious to this new norm, the global brands and the global brand aspirants have no choice. So what should Sri Lankan brands aspiring to be global do?
Quite clearly, Sri Lankan businesses and brands will need to be global frontrunners in designing lives and creating better experiences, at the Speed of Life. This requires reinvention and reinterpretation in the context of resolving conflicts. They must find relevancy and their new role in creating better life experiences.
Being purpose-led
After Sri Lankan brands find relevance and an aspirational global role, the next big step is about setting a goal and creating a purpose. Once you do that and commit to it, the Universe, as is oft repeated rather romantically, conspires to help you achieve it.
Finding their global purpose will create new relevance and authenticity for the Cognitive Era brands. This is what will enable their decisive social presence, as people will connect most with the resolutions of their most powerful and unresolved conflicts. That’s what they will talk about and share. This makes it easy for such businesses and brands to gain allcrucial consumer advocacy, the highest form of engagement.
At a conceptual level, it would have been enough to provide a definitive philosophical direction to the global brand aspirants. But there are challenges both at global and local levels that brands and marketing have to contend with.
Being purpose-bred
In our analysis, the toughest challenge for brands and marketing is a lack of the experience and ability managing today’s complex and pervasive customer journeys and the micro experiences they’re composed of. There is a desperate need for an anchor to tie it all together – an anchor with a meaning system; a purposeful anchor that inspires and connects people around culture on the inside, and around experience on the outside; an anchor that breeds focus and consistency through governance; one that orients the brand’s commitment through clarity and responsiveness.
The organisation’s ability to do so with its brand will create the only possible differentiation in an age of easy imitation. Indeed, brands are the only sustainable differentiation that businesses have to leverage their competitive growth. Unfortunately, that’s where the problem lies when it comes to Sri Lankan businesses.
Historically, Sri Lankan businesses have led brands. There always was an entrepreneurial business strategy followed by broad functional strategies – HR, sourcing, manufacturing, R&D, distribution, sales, marketing and so on.
Somewhere within marketing was communication and brand. The brand was seen as an overhead. A side element, left to the marketing department and contributed to by creative and media agencies. Managers enthusiastically extolled its virtues but could never prove its value. Indeed, for anything to be of consequence in business, its materiality needs to be clear and measurable. Since no one could achieve the analytical depth for isolating and measuring the economic impact of brand, it was always convenient to keep it with the subjective softer aspects of business like advertising and design.
At Interbrand, we have strived fiercely all around the world to dispel this paradigm; to take the brand out of the confining preserve of marketing and to place it in the centre of the organisation, making it a potent tool for driving business growth.
This we believe is also the way of driving growth for businesses aspiring to grow global. And unlike the traditional communications-led practices, we clearly see definitive and measurable brand-led pathways of global growth at every level.
1. Growing Global through structural optimisation
One invests to set up and manage the various functional aspects of the business anyway. Wouldn’t simple principles of synergy and cohesion make it more efficient if we could somehow integrate the functional strategies though an organising principle? And what would be better than using the brand itself as an organising principle?
2. Growing Global through internal anchoring in brand purpose
The purposefulness of the organisation then becomes the premise for stronger employee engagement. McKinsey’s Service Profit Chain model describes the rationale behind it succinctly. Organisations with stronger internal engagement have been conclusively proven to deliver superior financial fundamentals.
3. Growing Global through a brand-led focus on premium demand drivers, and demand sustenance
A powerful way of driving business growth and global aspirations can be rooted in the brand definition itself. Any business will do well by way of three simple factors – demand generation, demand sustenance and the ability to charge a premium.
The demand generation in any business or category, as also its premium, is a function of how strongly the business owns the important drivers influencing the purchase. The sustenance of demand is decided by the strength of the brand, internally and externally.
This is the basic approach employed for strategic positioning and definition for the Best Global Brands and will surely benefit the Sri Lankan brands aspiring to grow global.
4. Brand as an anchor for global portfolio management and governance
Many Sri Lankan organisations today have grown organically into a situation where they have a proliferated portfolio. For most, the new product or service opportunities over a period of time either found the same brand on the cover or a new name. Neither was there a destination envisaging strategic basis, nor was there a long-term naming system to ensure coherence in the rapid additions to the spectrum.
This understandably dilutes the impact of the brand by confusing the orientation and the ownership of a sharp demand driver as well as weakening many brand strength factors such as Clarity, Authenticity, Consistency and Understanding.
By adopting a brand- centric portfolio management, it is possible to create brand architectures via an alignment based on synergy of demand drivers and compliment of brand strengths. This helps clearly decide on the adjacencies of the brand and the real need for additional primary and secondary brands.
5. Global growth through authentic and differentiated brand experiences
Experience is a sum total of all the touchpoints that the business has across its stakeholders, both internal and external, offline and online. Managing the proliferating new micro experiences creates one of the more complex challenges for brands and marketing today.
The touchpoints of experience are not limited to communication alone, as the majority in the Sri Lankan market tends to believe. The touchpoints include product and service experiences, the behaviour of staff, the channel experience and digital, internal and external communications. A large number of these touchpoints across Sri Lankan businesses do not follow a converged theme. Wouldn’t it be efficient and productive if there were one? Again, can there be a better basis for affecting this convergence than brands themselves especially for the Indian businesses aspiring to grow and compete with global brands?
6. Reorienting legacy businesses for Growing Global in the digital age
Sri Lankan business as well as the Best Sri Lankan Brands league table is dominated by legacy organisations. These businesses are Sri Lanka’s best bet for global growth. It is therefore imperative for them to reorient themselves for the new world. Understanding the needs and aspirations of global customers and realigning their purpose, technologies, people, offerings and experiences will help realise their ambition of global growth. The difficult part will be balancing local opportunities with global ones, as Sri Lanka itself is a large consumption market fast emerging as a key global market too.
7. Nation brand support for Growing Global
A common pushback from Sri Lankan brands when it comes to doing well in the centre- stage markets of the world, i. e. North America and Europe, or whenit comes to playing in categories that are upstream, is the baggage of its nation brand. And the fact is that the global customers do not tend to accept a premium play from a Sri Lankan brand. Well, it may serve well to remind such brands of how in many cases it is the brands themselves that build the nation brand. Korea was no Japan when it came to image but it took a Samsung to uplift that nation’s brand. Why can’t a Bank of Ceylon, Dialog, LB Finance, Cargills or Lion do the same for Sri Lanka?
It may also be worth considering a central, state-led effort to reposition the nation brand of Sri Lanka, more from trade, investments and acceptance of global markets for Sri Lankan brands perspective. There are examples of Holland, Kenya, Turkey (Turquality) and Vietnam (Vietnam Value) to study and build upon.