Episode 134 / Falak Jalil / Nestlé / Regional Portfolio Manager MENA

Podcast: Why Brands Need to Balance Being Locally Relevant and Globally Efficient

Prior to her current role as Regional Portfolio Manager MENA at Nestlé, Falak Jalil has accumulated years of experience delivering end-to-end marketing campaigns and learning about how to personalise adverts to the right customer segment. Today, her Shiny New Object is personalisation at a global scale, accounting for local trends and interests to make a brand’s message actually connect with customers.

No one is born a marketeer, says Falak – you need to learn. And you learn by asking questions, at the start of your career as well as continuously thereafter. Ensuring that you understand customers’ preferences and mentality is a lifelong challenge, which is why brands have to find ways to become relevant and then stay that way.

Talking about Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point and its relevance in marketing today, when social media has made it so much easier to “go viral,” Falak thinks that the real challenge now is to stay viral. Otherwise, everything becomes old news the following day. This is why brands becoming more relevant to their target markets is more important than ever.

Falak’s Shiny New Object is personalisation at a global scale. Concretely, this refers to creating messages that can be relevant to customers around the world, or creating multiple messages for one brand, to ensure local relevance. A recent marketing survey showed that as much as three quarters of consumers don’t actually relate to brand communications anymore – hence why this is an important move to make.

How can brands achieve local relevance? Sometimes, it can be as simple as doing a photo shoot with models from different countries when advertising a hair care brand. This is something that Falak was able to do in her role at Unilever, making each ad look more like their target segment. Other times, it can be much more complex and involve hiring and running teams locally, in each country or region where a brand is trying to develop its message. Going closer to where the consumers are then ensures that whatever that team produces will resonate with them.

To find out more about Falak’s favourite marketing tips, her top book recommendations and how she’s working to ensure the brands she manages stay locally relevant, listen to the podcast here.

Transcription

The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.

Tom Ollerton 0:00

Hi. I wonder if you could help me out. I am looking to hire a Global Head of Growth for Automated Creative. So a little bit about us. We're on a mission to help brands turn their impressions into intelligence. We have a technology that researchers consumers by analysing how they respond to optimise paid advertising. It's very fancy, very cool and very successful for brands like Samsung, Diageo, Reckitt, KFC, Pernod Ricard, Bose, Unilever, GSK and people like NCS. So we've been doing brilliant work for the past few years. And we want to hire someone that can help us grow our portfolio of exciting and innovative clients. So if you or someone you know, have been working in sales or new business for the last 10 or 15 years, and would like to talk to us about the position, Please, could you give me an email on Tom at automated creative dotnet. Right, on with the show.

Hello, and welcome to the Shiny New Object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of Automated Creative. And this is a podcast about the future of marketing every week or so I have the pleasure and the privilege of interviewing our industry's leaders, and this week is no different. I'm on a call with Falak Jalil, who is regional portfolio manager MENA at Nestle. Falak thank you so much for joining us. There's gonna be some people listening to this who don't know who you are or what you do. Could you give them an overview of your career to date and what you do now?

Falak Jalil 1:42

Hi, thanks for having me. By the way, good pronunciation of my name. So hi, I'm Falak. I have over like 12 years of brands customer marketing and innovation management experience across Nestle, Unilever and Reckitt. I've worked across multiple geographies on both brand building and brand development on billion dollar brands. And I've had the privilege of launching a brand from scratch. I'm sorry, that sounded like an introduction in an interview.

Tom Ollerton 2:16

This is very much an interview. I didn't mention that.

Falak Jalil 2:20

So I started my career at Unilever, spent around seven years there building brands. And I had a very unique opportunity of launching a brand from scratch there in the ice cream category.

Tom Ollerton 2:30

Which one was that?

Falak Jalil 2:32

And I moved to Reckitt Benckiser. It's a local artisanal ice cream brand called Badami. Badami basically is an Urdu word. It translates into "almondy" roughly speaking, and it was an artisanal ice cream coffee brand that we launched in Unilever.

And we worked on everything from the packaging, to the product architecture, the range architecture, the brand key, the communication strategy. So it was a very, very unique and exciting experience.

Tom Ollerton 3:18

Right. So that is a varied career for some of the biggest organisations in marketing. That's fantastic. So if someone wanted to try and replicate your career, but they were a mere student, at this point, recently graduated, what advice would you give to them?

Falak Jalil 3:35

Ah, I think the first piece of advice our tell them was, you need to go through the grind, in my native language, Urdu, we call it [...] which really means that you have to go through the, you know, the motions of being rubbed against something. And what it really means is unpaid internships, long hours, menial work, it's all tantamount to learning the ropes in a practical setting. And when you know, a system from ground up, you can manage it better when you're in charge. So that's the first thing I would say to them. The second thing I would say to them is, there's no such thing as a stupid question. And I think this is applicable for any industry really, but it's especially true for someone who wants to understand the vagaries of a consumer's mind and how we arrive at the conclusions we do when marketing to them. I don't think marketing is a science or an art, but there is a lot of intuition at times. This intuition is built on years of experience and knowledge. And I really don't think anyone is born a marketeer, you have to learn and you do that by asking questions.

Another thing that I can think of is, think big. Always, don't be limited by your budget or the resources. The money will come provided the ideas are there.

Tom Ollerton 5:07

So how do you? How do you deal with learning new stuff? So sometimes as you say, you got to go through the grind to get rubbed up against things got to learn the ropes, so that when you're managing that you've done that before. How do you manage people who are doing things that you've not done before, whether that's a new platform or a new channel or new trends, where you don't have the time to, you know, download TikTok and look at a billion TikTok, before you understand what it is and get that muscle memory? How do you manage something that you've never had to manage?

Falak Jalil 5:43

I think, especially in terms of new media, or new trends, I think this is where your agencies come into play, you really need to treat your agencies like partners, I really believe that they are what, you know, bring about the multiplier effect. The other thing is also, you need to trust the expertise of anyone who's bringing forth something. Whether it's in procurement and supply chain, or it's in media. And I mean, especially in today's world of social media, there's just so many things coming up. You need to trust the experts, and you need to let them teach you also.

Tom Ollerton 6:33

So are you a reader of marketing books? Do you plough through volumes and volumes? Or do you have a few books that you keep on going back to? And if so, which would you recommend that students or any of us should be reading?

Falak Jalil 6:49

Sure, so I do love to read a lot. Nowadays, I've noticed that it's become more of management. Back when I was going through the grind, I love reading a lot of marketing books. And I think one book that I recommend to everybody I know, is the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point is what he describes as the point of critical mass or the boiling point. And he's talked about various cases. There's Hush Puppies and Sesame Street in the book, where ideas, products and behaviours basically spread like viruses do. And I think it's become more relevant in today's world with the mass proliferation of social media. This is something that I do still recommend everyone to read, if I can tell you a little bit about it. So how does a social epidemic take place? You know, you'd ask.

There are the three laws or other three agents of change for the law of epidemics to come in motion. The first is the law of the few, which basically takes your 80/20 principle into account, which is that most of the work is done by a few people. That is, success of any social epidemic depends heavily on a few people with certain gifts. These people are connectors. They're mavens, and salesmen. Connectors are anyone you know, who have social equivalent of like a computer network hub, we all know them, you know, the people with 1500 friends on Facebook, or LinkedIn. Mavens are information specialists. These are people you know, in today's world kind of like the influences. So anyone we rely on to connect us with new information based on anything that they've done their research on, and then salesman or your persuaders, not the charismatic people. But the powerful negotiation skills. And these three combined are basically what forms the whole network. Another law that he talks about is the law of stickiness, which is how memorable or distinctive any product or idea is. And then the last line he talks about is context, which is basically how human behaviour is very strongly influenced by environment. And it's a very fascinating book about the science of human behaviour, which is what we basically study as marketeers really, you know. So yeah, that's one that..

Tom Ollerton 9:43

Do you think the book is still relevant in a very much more media driven social environment. Some would argue that it always was, yes, there was always it was always pay to play. But at the time that book was written was 10 years ago. Maybe like 8 more than that okay. And that was very much in this kind of go viral blogger world where things would catch fire. And then there will be shared as trends and they would tip, whereas Facebook and Google and some of the other platforms have cornered the market to a degree, where, you know, if you want to drop enough money on TikTok, you can make everyone see your ads, and then it doesn't really matter if it goes viral or not. Because everyone's seen it and landed your point. Do you think Tipping Point is still as relevant in a much more media centric social web?

Falak Jalil 10:35

I think it is, I think the only thing that it could probably now change or adapt to today's world is how to keep going in terms of the tipping point how to keep how to keep being viral, especially as you said that, you know that you know, you can, in today's context, anything can become viral. But what we see is something becomes viral today. And then tomorrow, it's old news. And, you know, to ensure that the virality continues that it keeps on growing. That is something that Mr. Gladwell can probably adapt his message to. But in terms of the core message, I really think it's still relevant. Because I mean, at the end of the day, one of the laws that he talks about is the law of stickiness, right. And he talks about how memorable or distinctive the idea or your product is. And that still is true in today's world. There's a lot more competition, yes. But in terms of being memorable, being distinctive, you know, that USP that we talk about in brand marketing still remains true. And even the law of context, you know, the environment, everything that we see that we hear that we consume, a lot of it is based on what we see and feel and hear around us is, I think changing, but at the core of it, we're still the same.

Tom Ollerton 12:35

So before we move on to your shiny new object, I'd like to know, what is your killer marketing tip, whether that's from a Malcolm Gladwell book, or from some of your peers, from the businesses that you've worked for, but what is that golden nugget, silver bullet bit of advice that you find yourself giving most often?

Falak Jalil 13:00

You know, this one is going to sound trite, I realise. But it is something that I hear is so relevant still. And it's something that somebody said to me when I was interning, and it's really stuck. That's why I think it's still relevant today. And it is that perception is reality. And I think more than marketing, it's a great lesson in personal marketing. And it basically tells you that your behaviour and its results matter more than your intentions. But what it really does is it reminds you that people don't have time to make a well informed opinion of you, the minds will make a schema of whatever data is thrown at them. Because as humans, we all have shortcuts. But oddly enough, that's true for consumers, they will form an opinion on your brand, based on whatever data is easily and most obviously available to them. So perception does really become reality.

Tom Ollerton 14:08

I like that a lot. People will form an opinion without looking at all the evidence and just following their path of least resistance. That's probably true.

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So we're at the halfway stage and we're now going to talk about your shiny new object, which is personalization at a global scale. Now I gave it that name in fairness, I think you had a much longer description. So could you give us a bit more information about why that's your shiny new object and why you think it's gonna change the future of the industry.

Falak Jalil 15:19

So basically, the fundamentally what my belief is that we need to move away from one universal brand key, or a global consumer insight, and move towards more personalization. And I think just to first understand why this consolidation of the global brands began, I think it was around a decade and a half ago, where companies realised that countries had started creating their own communication. And they're started drifting away from the core insight platform, and into territories that the brand shouldn't really be in to a degree where you could probably pick up three different copies from different parts of the world. And other than the same brand name, the central message would have nothing in common. And I still do subscribe to the notion of a global brand. But now it's gone to the other end of the spectrum, where consumers cannot relate to the communication anymore. During Cantor did this ad reaction study called "Getting gender right". It was 2019, I think. And we saw that three quarters of consumers believe that the way they're portrayed in advertising is completely out of touch. And they saw that often women are over targeted in categories like laundry and household products and under targeted in other areas like automotive, and ads featuring only women are featuring both genders equally tended to underperform. And really, these portrayals are rarely aspirational, or authoritative for either gender. And, and this alarms me as a marketeer that three quarters of consumers think that communication is completely out of touch that it doesn't speak for them. I just give you an example of this problem from my category breakfast cereal. Now, it's a universally known fact that mums want their kids to have a good breakfast before they go to school. I say fact not inside, because there's nothing unique about this behaviour. That comes the tricky part. What constitutes a good breakfast, this differs depending on the area that you come in from the mountains in North America, even the UK, a breakfast cereal high in fibre and whole grain does the trick. So we're covered that. However, in Southeast Asia, they give rice in the morning meal, you start moving west, you'll get a plethora of different options, from egg imperata in South Asia, to hummus in the Middle East, tea and biscuits in Egypt, bread and olive oil in Morocco. Can you really have one global communication catering to all these needs?

Tom Ollerton 18:08

I have to say though, it's half past one when we record this and you make me really hungry. But anyway. All of that sounds really good right now. Yeah, sorry, carry on. So yes, of course, there's different cultural needs different beliefs, different behaviours. And the global tone of voice obviously doesn't cite not so the global position or the global campaign platform even won't cover all of this off. But I just want to go back to kind of where you started on that point. And I remember, when I started at We Are Social many years ago, it was all this, like, how do we do global versus local? It was this kind of huge thing. But one thing I still struggle to understand is, why does it matter? If a brand is differs from Market to Market? Sure, there might be some confused jetsetters as they fly around on business trips, but really, is it? Is it so damaging to a brand for to represent different things in different markets? Are there that many people travelling that the brand gets dismantled if people have a slightly different view of a different market? And so different brands and different markets are missing the point?

Falak Jalil 19:14

Honestly, I don't know. Because this is one of the fundamental reasons why we move to global brands. And this is across most companies, you can take P&G you can take Unilever and Nestle. That is the reason, the fundamental reason why they started. Another reason was, you know, to move to global communications in the case, because of working and non working media. I'm sure you've heard a lot of this term. It's the bane of existence for most agencies. But that's the other reason why you wanted to move towards a global brand. So we can get our media dollars to work harder for us, because if the majority of it is being spent on production. Especially if we start producing multiple copies for multiple regions.

Tom Ollerton 20:05

So there's a there's, it's an efficiency need, as opposed to protecting the brand need, right? So you get a better media deal. You don't duplicate production in multiple, multiple markets. But what you do, when you save that money, you take a significant step away from the person that really matters, which is the consumer. Right? Right. So what's the solution to that problem? How do you save money, and yet stay close to the consumer.

Falak Jalil 20:32

So you know, there was this one great solution that they caught of when I was working for Unilever. I was on haircare. And what we did was we did one shoot, but based on the different regions that the communication was going to go through to, they had different models come in. So for example, we had one model from India, one from Philippines, one from Pakistan, you know, so and so forth. So that one shot was shot around three or four times. But this was in the case where the concept is seen. And the idea behind it was that the fixed costs would be the same, the only absorbing the higher costs for the tapes and the travel. However, if you don't have the same ad concept, even what about when the concept is different? I really still haven't quite worked it out yet. I'll be honest, I'll let you know. And I do.

Tom Ollerton 21:28

So if someone's listening to this, who's on a global marketing team, and they think in right, you have to be locally relevant, but globally efficient. What are the simple steps that they can take towards trying to solve this other than doing the photo shoot approach that you mentioned, where you get people from multiple different backgrounds to be part of the central creative?

Falak Jalil 21:57

So this is very good point. You mentioned, Tom. You know, the other issue to tackle is that some of the fastest growing countries you have China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, they're just on different ends of the spectrum, in terms of their names. And they're still not represented well enough in global brand teams. And another thing that Unilever had done some time ago was, they started moving global brand teams to operate from where the brands consumers were the most. For example, the Lifepoints soap brand team, operated predominantly out of India, where the most consumers were even the lightweight shampoo. It's called Clinic Plus in India, their brand team also operated out of India. Conversely, the Walls ice cream team was headquartered in Italy. So I mean, I don't think these are perfect solutions. But going closer to where the consumers are, is definitely one step in the right direction. And of course, I think all of what I'm saying is also working on the principle that brands growth will come through penetration, you know, as our friend, Mr. Byron Sharp says, that's another good book, by the way, "How brands grow", maybe for another day.

But yeah, if if brands want to grow, and we know that penetration is the key, we will need to move on either the brand teams or make sure that the brand development is happening in the key markets. I mean, for example, if you just look at the top 10 millennial markets, India, China, USA, Indonesia, Brazil, these are five of the biggest millennial markets where the most consumers are really going to emerge from and how many global brand pins are operating out of these countries other than USA? I don't think many.

Tom Ollerton 24:11

So unfortunately, we are run out of time. So we need to wrap this up. You've asked some very provocative questions and made some, I think, especially at the end, therea bold solution, you know, to for brands to actually move their teams to where the the majority of their consumers are, which will be uncomfortable for everyone. If someone wanted to carry on this conversation with you, how would you like them to do that?

Falak Jalil 24:37

They can reach me out, reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Tom Ollerton 24:40

And what makes a really good LinkedIn outreach to you.

Falak Jalil 24:44

I have a marketing solution. I'm joking. That's the worst one. Because I get that a lot. I think this to say to me that let's discuss. Let's talk about marketing. If that's your subject, I promise you, I will respond.

Tom Ollerton 25:04

Brilliant. That's good advice Falak. We have to leave it there. Thank you so much.

Falak Jalil 25:11

Thank you for having me, Tom, it was very interesting to discuss with you and I had a really good time also.

Tom Ollerton 25:22

Hi, just before you go, I'd really appreciate it. If you could take the time to write a review of the shiny new object podcast on Apple podcasts or iTunes, whatever it's called these days, or whichever podcast provider you use. We're on any podcast. So it would go a long way for us if you could just share the Word and give us a bit of support on those channels, such as be fantastic. If you haven't got time, that's also cool. And yeah, if you could tell your colleagues about the podcast and also, if possible, don't forget to subscribe. And I'd love to hear your feedback. If you'd like to speak on the podcast or be a guest or you think I'm asking the wrong questions, anything I'd be super interested to hear what you think so please email me at Tom at automated creative dotnet. I'm not gonna bother spelling it. Anyway. You'll work it out. Thanks so much.