CMO at Nord Security, one of the leaders in providing digital security and privacy solutions for individuals and businesses.
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In March of this year, the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once premiered and received praise from critics and audiences. It was a story about Evelyn, a Chinese-American immigrant who runs a laundromat. As the film title suggests, Evelyn is overwhelmed by everything in her life because she has a business to run, must deal with a tax audit and family members being difficult, and of course, needs to please clients. I think the movie was a refreshing take on the idea that we are all living in the multiverse, but for me, it captured the familiar feeling of how it sometimes feels to be completely overwhelmed when you are working with a global brand. And I believe CMOs and marketers of international brands occasionally share that feeling.
2022, in particular, is full of challenges for marketing professionals and managers. The pandemic and strict remote work conditions prompted some of the talent pool to relocate away from the office, and with rising gas and food costs, people may not be too keen to return to in-person work. And while remote work displayed a completely different way of working and managing the work-life balance, it presented a new challenge in keeping people engaged, as data from Emotive Technologies (via Forbes) shows that remote workers feel less engaged. The recent "quiet quitting" movement (paywall) illustrates this new set of issues.
Yet these challenges are just the latest icing on the cake of the usual concerns that trouble marketing managers. How can we turn the issues into challenges we can overcome? There is no one silver-bullet strategy that's perfect for every company. Still, I will share action points that help me successfully manage a global team of more than 200 marketing professionals that can also benefit other managers.
Focus On Mental Health
Even for seasoned marketing veterans, the changing work environment created enough disruptions to tilt the healthy mindfulness balance. For some novice marketing professionals, I even heard that it led to diminished creativity.
Companies that care about employees' physical and mental well-being understand that with relatively low-cost tools and strategies, they can take steps to safeguard their talent pool and maintain pre-pandemic productivity levels.
Providing your teams with mental health support is even easier with the increased range of scalable mental well-being apps. So whether your company pays for therapy or offers well-being app subscriptions, investing in mental health should be a priority.
Aim To Have Regular Cross-Team Syncs And Get-Togethers
Any growing marketing department is bound to branch off into different teams. Multiple teams with remote employees can struggle to be on the same page when they have few to no live interactions. Here, regular cross-team syncs and get-togethers could be your lifeline.
The details of these activities aren't as important as having them regularly. In my experience, it's best to mix official business that needs to be discussed with quality bonding time. Sharing information is just as important as building mutual trust.
Enable Local Talent And A Testing-Focused Approach To The New Markets
Unlocking new markets for your global brand's growth can become chaotic. It's easy to miss a small but culturally significant detail, like having people with beards in your marketing campaign illustrations for a region where it is an extremely rare sight. That can put your whole global campaign on pause. But you can either give in and assume that every big launch will have mistakes or focus on enabling local talent and testing as much as possible in advance.
Having a local marketing expert on your team might seem inefficient in the short term. But in the long term, it provides additional benefits, like fast-tracking your process or adding an invaluable set of eyes that will notice red flags early. But your local talent isn't all-knowing either, so don't rely on them alone. Test all possible angles of the campaign before launch.
Optimize Your Offices To Increase The Sense Of Belonging
What should you do with your office space if you're struggling to welcome back your talent after the remote work period? Again, there are two sides to the issue. If your company realized that the pandemic didn't cap your potential in any way, eliminating the office entirely could be a straightforward choice. There are generally no business benefits to having offices just for the sake of them. Yet if your company thrives on live interactions between colleagues and organic learning, your post-pandemic office might need a few adjustments.
Because we have precisely that sort of culture at our company, we were presented with the same challenge with our new office in Berlin, where we had many employees with remote-only work preferences. But instead of choosing strict policies, we aimed to create an office where people felt a true sense of belonging.
It took us a lot of work to get there, from celebrating milestones and initiating team-building activities to partnering with local organizations to create an office that accommodates everyone's needs. We made sure hybrid work-from-home options were available, but at the same time, we offered easy ways to commute to the office. When people started hanging out in the office even after work, we knew we were on the right path.
Marketing teams from global brands may face vastly different challenges in the upcoming years depending on their industry, so it is hard to predict these challenges and offer universal advice. But in my experience, you can overcome a lot of barriers when you put your trust in your own people and make an effort to develop a welcoming community where everyone feels they belong. In a world where everything is happening everywhere, all at once, and where we sometimes feel more and more separate from each other, it can make a huge difference.
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