While their purposes and priorities are often worlds apart, the brands we work with across different industries are often facing similar challenges.
Faster times to market. Seamless in-house asset creation. Global consistency with local messaging. These priorities are likely to hit home with teams working in every industry.
This article will be exploring the way that each of these challenges impact global brands in the Pharma, Banking, IT and FMCG sectors. We’ll be explaining how they have adapted their output to meet new demands and what it means for them to produce relevant content for the world we’re living in.
Before we get stuck in, let’s take a quick look at two of the most significant industry-wide changes in the marketing landscape:
Increasing the focus on digital
We’ve covered the digital revolution a few times within our articles. As game-changing innovations continue to emerge, it’s a topic that never stops being relevant.
It has given marketers a constantly evolving suite of platforms and technologies for reaching their audiences. Virtual reality. Tailored online shopping experiences. Digital healthcare. Plus new social media platforms that seem to be emerging every month. Customers and consumers have more ways to interact with products than ever before, and the overwhelming majority are digital.
Time for a refresh?
2020 saw an unusually high number of brands refresh their identity. While this is a good thing to do before your brand starts feeling a little out of date, so many companies rebranding at a similar time was no coincidence. For many, it was more of a timely response than a routine update.
The media had named 2019 ‘the year of protest’ with demonstrations taking place in every corner of the globe. They were centred around various injustices but a vast majority were taking on gender inequality, racism and climate change. More people took part in protests than any other year, and the implications for brands were huge.
Consumers were demanding a change from unethical business practices, unsustainable products and insensitive messaging. Apologies for ‘missing the mark’ in their advertising no longer cut it. To earn the trust of audiences in 2021, brands need to prove that their brand has a positive influence on the world. For many, rebranding has been an opportunity to bring their positive attributes front and centre, and show where their products and services provide genuine value.
4 industries getting the best from BAM
After reading the above, you might be thinking that marketers have got their work cut out — and you’d be right… Producing assets for endless new platforms, getting them to market at pace, and with watertight consistency, isn’t easy.
To make matters worse, each industry will have its own nuance, trends and best practices that need to be thought about.
Brand Managers need not despair – BAM can take the stress away from accommodating these extra workloads, new formats and cultural nuances.
Here’s how brands across four prominent industries can make change happen with BAM:
Pharma
The move towards a more patient-centric approach through the use of wearables, apps and cloud-based products has made pharma marketing one of the richest territories for digital innovation.
Despite being fairly late in adopting digital, this is an industry that is becoming ever more reliant on it. While brochures are still an important way for patients to learn about pharma products and services, there has been a landslide shift to the use of video and social channels for promoting new healthcare tech that provide patients with a more active role in their healthcare.
As well as an ever-growing number of products and services now available, an ageing demographic across most of the world will boost the market for prescription drug treatments. This is likely to equate to approximately $1.2 trillion by 2024. The resulting increase in digital output will require some big changes in the processes and best practices of pharma marketing.
Marketing any medical product is full of legal implications and often means lengthy approval processes. This can get unmanageable when launching a campaign in multiple countries each with their own laws surrounding the types of product that can be sold there as well as how they can be marketed. Luckily, BAM makes it quick and simple to loop your legal teams into approval processes. That means you can be sure that quicker times to market, doesn’t mean cutting corners.
As well as the ability to produce unlimited print assets, BAM gives pharma marketing teams the ability to produce digital assets at pace and scale. Plus they can be converted to fit relevant social channels in just a few clicks.
4 ways to use BAM in pharma
Digitisation
With the rise of wearables and cloud-based healthcare apps, BAM helps pharma companies take advantage of every digital opportunity with templates for a range of online formats.
Personalisation
Patients are taking a more active role in their own health. With BAM, pharma marketing teams have the in-house tools they need to make campaigns resonate with their audiences.
Videos and social media assets
Although the pharma industry has been relatively late to use the full potential of social media, having an online presence is now more important than ever. BAM is helping teams catch up with easy to use templates for every social channel.
Accuracy
For obvious reasons, there is absolutely no room for error in pharmaceutical marketing. BAM allows you to loop your legal teams into approvals processes so you can be sure that all your marketing materials are ready to go.
If you work in the pharma industry for an employer brand team, check out our ‘The future of pharma’ whitepaper.
If you work in a wider marketing team in the pharma industry, you might be interested in ‘The changing face of pharma marketing’ whitepaper.
Banking
As noted earlier, there have been a number of sector-wide rebrands to come out of the last few years. Perhaps most notably in banking.
After the emergence of numerous unethical practices, the banking industry has been tarnished with a distinct lack of consumer trust. This led to a number of banks needing to shift their priorities and change their tone in order to prove that the industry had learnt from its mistakes.
One of the key factors for instilling trust in consumers is consistency. No matter how much your advertising tugs your audience’s heartstrings, emotional messaging won’t hold any weight if they are met with bland confusing financial jargon when they go through to your website, for example. For consumers to believe in a brand, its messaging needs to come through authentically at every interaction.
However, consistency can be tricky when you’re rolling out campaigns across the globe. You can’t just go full steam ahead with a campaign without understanding the nuance in every market it’s launching in. At best your messaging might be confusing, at worst it could be causing offence.
Getting to understand cultural nuance is one of the ways HSBC really was able to become ‘The World’s Local Bank’. With BAM’s easy to use templates and localisation feature, local teams can access relevant and culturally appropriate marketing materials for their specific markets. It means that all messaging can land as intended, in any location.
4 ways to use BAM in Banking
Cultural nuance
For a bank to become truly global, its communications need to land as intended in every market. BAM’s localisation feature helps teams make their marketing nuanced and culturally relevant across the globe.
Consistency
While capturing the subtle differences in every local market, BAM helps marketing teams ensure that the messaging, tone, look and feel of a bank’s marketing is familiar anywhere in the world.
Trust
Staying on brand is the key to building loyalty among consumers. BAM makes your brand guidelines easily accessible and shareable to keep all your teams up-to-speed.
Clarity
With its visual campaign planner, BAM gives teams a bird’s eye view of where and how marketing materials are being used. It allows you to tag briefs to specific campaigns and be sure that relevant teams are in-the-know.
IT and Telecoms
Arguably the greatest use of modern technology is its incredible ability to connect people. This makes it even more important for organisations like IBM and Vodafone to have a brand that connects with their audiences and their employees in offices across the globe.
The sheer volume of assets that teams at large telecoms providers and global IT companies need to produce is astounding. It can also be overwhelming for the teams trying to get them over the line. Relying on agencies for routine tasks is too slow and costly, while ensuring global consistency with cultural relevance can easily spiral off-brand.
In-house asset creation. Global brand governance. Watertight approvals from one location. This pipe dream is an everyday reality for marketing teams using the power of BAM. With a simple creation suite, in-house teams can produce high-quality marketing materials within set templates. Approvals are made seamless too, with all key stakeholders notified at every stage of production. With BAM, teams can be agile, accurate and create with confidence without professional support.
4 ways to use BAM in IT and Telecoms
In-house creation
To cope with the volume of marketing materials that global IT and Telecoms companies need to produce, BAM’s innovative creation suite reduces the need for agency help. When you can bring more production in-house, you can cut lengthy back-and-forth approval processes and get better value for your agency budget.
Agility
With much faster times to market, your teams will be able to respond faster to new opportunities.
Approvals
When your teams are producing a high volume of assets for campaigns across the globe, BAM helps you keep track of approvals from a single location. It also ensures that all key stakeholders are kept in the loop.
Connecting employees across the globe
In a large global company, it can be a major challenge to keep your teams aligned with your core values and company goals. BAM brings your teams together from a central location, giving them access to assets that resonate with local markets and align with your employer brand.
Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG)
To meet consumer demand, Unilever, Coca-Cola, Mars and other FMCG conglomerates have to react fast on a global scale. These big names are omnipresent, with their products in almost every corner of the globe. Unilever, for example, has a presence in 190 markets around the world.
To take advantage of every opportunity, in every market, their variety of brands need different messaging and imagery to appeal to consumers in different locations. To make matters more complicated, this varies in countries, states and even cities in the same region.
To achieve this level of accuracy on such a colossal scale, Unilever uses BAM to empower local teams to take asset creation in-house. They can use PIM & ERP integration to respond faster to local demand and access relevant, localised guidelines from a single shared location.
4 ways to use BAM in FMCG
Scale of production
To keep up with the incredible volume of work required to market FMCG products across the globe, BAM streamlines your processes and reduces the need to repeat tasks such as recreating the same assets for different channels.
Speed to market
With easy in-house creation tools, BAM helps you respond in time to take advantage of consumer demand and other shifts in the marketplace well before the competition.
PIM & ERP integration
To react fast with pinpoint accuracy, FMCG marketing teams can use BAM to integrate their PIM & ERP systems.
Localised guidelines
Keeping track of a number of different brands, in a number of different locations can become a little overwhelming. To take the stress away from this process, BAM provides a single location for localised guidelines. This means that teams across the globe have everything they need to ensure the materials they create stay on brand.
Taking on cross-industry challenges with BAM
Even if your company doesn’t fall under one of the four industries above, some of the challenges we covered will surely sound familiar to you or your teams. BAM can create endless opportunities for companies in all kinds of sectors. Want to see where it can give your teams the freedom to fly? Get in touch with our teams to arrange your free live demo today.