My Best Marketing Tips #29: Nestlé / Falak Jalil / Regional Portfolio Manager MENA
My Best Marketing Tips #29: Nestlé / Falak Jalil / Regional Portfolio Manager MENA
Falak Jalil has worked for impressive global brands such as Unilever, Reckitt Benckiser and now Nestlé. She’s done everything, including launching a product from scratch and overseeing packaging all the way up to the advertising messages. One of the key lessons from this experience, however, is that brands should start to focus on personalising their message more to the key markets.
Falak was stunned to hear in a recent marketing report that, nowadays, as much as 75% of consumers don’t relate to brands’ communications anymore. This is why she’s advocating for developing local relevance in marketing.
What would be your best marketing tip?
Perception is reality.
You can have the best intentions, but people don’t have time to delve into your motivations and your background enough. Instead, they’ll form an opinion on you and your brand based on what’s easily available to them.
How have you put this marketing tip to good use?
I refer back to this motto in my personal life as well as in work. As humans, we love shortcuts. We love moving to what we think is the essential. So, always have this in mind when you put out communications for your brand or for yourself, really.
What marketing tips does the industry need most right now?
Brands have spent the last decade or so moving into a global production pattern, to save costs on duplicating work with marketing teams in every country. But most consumers don’t relate to the global brand messaging anymore. Moreover, the consumer portrayals in these generic adverts are rarely aspirational (for example, we see that women are over-targeted in products like household cleaning and under-targeted in the automotive industry).
This is why I believe that brands need to make more efforts to become relevant locally and by market segment. For example, at Unilever, we did a photo shoot with different models depending on the destination country for one of our hair care ads. That’s a simple solution that’s cost effective, but there is more to do.
What is the marketing tip you give most often?
For students coming into the industry, I always say: “You need to go through the grind” – doing the basic jobs, learning the ropes, completing unpaid internships. When you know the system from the ground up, you can manage it better when you’re in charge.
Finally, there is no such thing as a stupid question, especially when it comes to understanding the mentality of the customer. No one is born a marketeer, you have to learn and you do that by asking questions.
Listen to Falak talk about more marketing tips, her favourite marketing books and her attempts to implement marketing personalisation at a global scale, on the latest episode of our Shiny New Object podcast.
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