Global brand activations aren’t just to flex a big marketing budget; these series are actually hugely important for companies looking to establish a strong presence and connection with audiences worldwide. These can be extremely localized events that ladder up to a brand or one large event tour that moves from place to place across continents.

Either way, a global brand activation and events strategy is a big step forward for brands looking to get their foothold in the larger international market. By diversifying their consumer base, brands open the door to new revenue opportunities, better brand visibility, and a more in-depth understanding of different markets.

However, a huge challenge these brands face is the siloed nature of their events when they move beyond one country. To properly diversify, they need to figure out how to execute a strategy that has a lasting impact across many different cultures and teams. 

This blog breaks down the most effective ways to make your brand activations and events resonate worldwide. 

The Power of Global Brand Activations & Events

So why is a global brand activation and event strategy so vital to brand growth? It all starts with visibility. Global brand activations and events allow companies to increase their visibility on a much larger scale, bringing their mission and products to consumers who would otherwise have rarely heard of them. They can tap into those new markets and expand their reach towards international growth and widespread distribution. 

Global Brand Event Example: Coca-Cola

You may be familiar with some of the big worldwide events Coca-Cola hosts, including their FIFA World Cup Trophy Tour. Their website describes the initiative as a tour that “invites football fans to view the most iconic symbol in football and experience the real magic of the world’s largest, most anticipated sporting event – the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™.” 

When we talked to Francisco Crespo, former Chief Growth Officer for Coca-Cola, he clearly understood why the tour worked. “How can I bring [an experience] to my audience beyond putting a thing on a can or ‘proud’ sponsor’ somewhere? At the end of the day, how does that connect with the brand purpose and show that it’s differential? FIFA World Cup was a success because alliances are brand assets that you use to ensure that it’s truly representing what the purpose of the brand is.”

Challenges in Global Brand Activations & Events

It’s not easy to plan, execute, and learn from global brand activations and event strategies.  There are unique challenges that pop up due to the diverse nature of markets, cultures, and logistical needs. If you’re planning, or are currently planning, to produce a global brand event strategy, here are some common challenges you may be faced with.

Cultural Differences

Adapting activations and events to align with diverse cultural nuances requires careful consideration. Misinterpretation or insensitivity to local customs can harm your brand's image, so fully understanding the culture you’re planning the brand event around will help you better adapt it to location norms. 

Language Barriers

Effective communication across teams and through marketing materials becomes a challenge when dealing with multiple languages. Hiring those who speak the native language to run the brand events is how many brands overcome the gap. However, even cultural nuances of language come into play, where understanding slang and differing meanings can help you avoid some embarrassing slip-ups.

Regulatory and Legal Compliance

Navigating different legal and regulatory landscapes across many regions can be complicated. Compliance with local laws, permits, and event regulations is essential but can be very time-consuming.

Logistical Complexity

Coordinating logistics for global events means you’re dealing with different time zones, transportation challenges, and constantly changing infrastructure capabilities, making the planning process very intricate.

Budgetary Constraints

Allocating and managing budgets across different currencies and economies is a challenge. Currency fluctuations can impact the overall cost of executing global activations, and you might end up spending more than you bargained for in one place for less than what you’d be able to get in another country. Planning this out ahead of time with currency adjustments is definitely to your benefit. 

Technology and Connectivity Issues

If you’re planning to use booking, walk-in reservations, or data-collecting software at your event, you might find your event tech hindered by varying levels of technological infrastructure and internet connectivity across different regions. Finding a solution that supports multiple languages and can work offline can save a lot of heartache around this challenge, but planning in advance for each leg of your event journey will help you dodge the more foreseeable tech issues. 

Consistency in Brand Messaging

Maintaining consistent brand messaging while adapting to diverse markets and their cultural nuance is crucial. A huge challenge for global brand activation and event strategies comes from striking the right balance between global brand identity and localized messaging, meaning a lot of work needs to go in upfront to understand those differences. 

Different Consumer Behaviors

Understanding and predicting consumer behaviors across regions can be complex. What works in one market may resonate differently in another, requiring careful market research pre-strategy launch.

Staffing Challenges

Ensuring you have a talented and culturally savvy team to pull off events in different regions is incredibly important. Being fluent in the local language and clued in on local customs is key to making those activations a hit, and hiring the right kind of people for the job can be a challenge. 

Measurement and Reporting

Consistently measuring the success of global activations can be challenging due to differences in reporting, the teams analyzing success, and data collection practices across regions. These data pieces also tend to be siloed, meaning the brand at large cannot find global trends or patterns that can help them determine their next move without heavy manual lifting.

Unforeseen Political and Environmental Factors

Political instability or unforeseen environmental events (natural disasters or pandemics, to name a few) can disrupt planned activations, pose safety concerns for participants, and are often hard to predict. 

Vendor Coordination

Coordinating with global vendors, suppliers, and partners introduces more complex challenges, like scheduling across time zones, communication, and ensuring a standardized level of quality.

Sustainability Challenges

Maintaining a commitment to sustainability, a common brand value, may be challenging in global activations and events due to all the different environmental standards and practices you might come across in different countries and regions.

Planning for Success

There are a few pieces of the puzzle to work on when you plan your brand activation and events strategy. Without walking through these planning buckets, your brand will have trouble finding a foothold in multiple markets and will have a harder time getting a better return on investment. 

Understanding Local Markets

Diving into a new market without localization research beforehand is a costly mistake. It’s important to do your market research and understand the nuances of the local culture you’re hosting an event for.

Consider your current market: what similarities would you like to try to use as a springboard for your new activation and events strategy? If it’s a specific demographic or persona, how does the age and gender of your target demo behave locally? How does that differ from what you’re used to? 

When you tailor your strategy towards the cultural differences of your target demographic, you stand a better chance of higher net promoter score ratings, purchase intent, and more. 

Collaborating With Local Influencers

When it comes to entering a new regional market as a lesser-known brand, it might be a good idea to leverage local influencers to enhance your brand credibility. Local celebrities or well-known figures are a good fit for your brand since these people have built an audience in their specific region and can use their authority to boost your visibility.

Building authentic connections with your target audience is vital from the get-go, so having an advocate in your corner who’s known and respected by the local community greatly helps your image. 

Logistics and Compliance

Like in email marketing, each region has different legal requirements for what you can and cannot do with your marketing. CAN-SPAM laws differ from CASL laws, and you must understand the nuance and difference based on where your events occur. Make sure you research what kind of events you can host, what licenses are required, and what pitfalls you need to be aware of.

This continues to be true for logistical challenges within different regions. For example, if you’re shipping goods from country to country, what will you need to provide to customs? Or if you’re driving a specialized truck, who’s driving? Will they need a certain kind of visa or passport? 

Understanding that each region and country has its rules and regulations will help you plan ahead earlier, and you can better avoid getting held up by complications. 

Unifying Your Information

One of the biggest parts of making your global activations and events strategy effective is how you unify your information. Since your efforts will be widespread, each new region will come with its own set of data, and with that, even more trends and patterns to find within it. Soon, you’ll find yourself drowning in information silos that you’ll spend hours trying to unify all on your own. 

Having a plan for how to keep information together and find larger trends and patterns within data sets will save you time and get you acting on insights faster. 

Centralized Data Management

Finding the right centralized experiential platform for event data is crucial. With so many different experiences ongoing in so many other regions of the world, it will make your job inexplicably harder to manually try and bring all that information together. 

With a centralized experiential platform, like AnyRoad, to manage your data, you can streamline all the information you gather into one platform for easy analysis. You can then see the larger trends across all regions instead of ultra-specific regional information. You can use it to adjust your events, build a customer persona per region, or expand your distribution strategy more efficiently. 

Real-Time Analytics

One struggle of global brand activations and events is that you don’t know how things went until everyone reports. Each region can feel in its little world, and you don’t understand how the strategy works until it’s all said and done. However, using real-time analytics to monitor your events creates visibility into performance in a way that helps you understand how the larger strategy is doing. 

A huge benefit of real-time analytics is that you can tell if something isn’t going how you hoped it would. Sure, it’s nice to see something succeed and go well. But it’s more important to understand when adjustments need to be made. And with an immediate information flow, you can take the initiative to make quick data-driven decisions for ongoing and future events. 

For example, CPG food brand JUST Egg ran a series of festival pop-ups to get people to try their plant-based eggs. As they passed out the samples, they received feedback from consumers saying the eggs were too watery with the tomato in the sample sandwich! The following day, they were able to alter the recipe for a boost in positive feedback.

Integrating Feedback Methods

Part of producing effective brand activations and events worldwide is incorporating feedback so you can gather new insights into how you did. With the right combination of survey questions, you can learn everything from how consumers felt about your event to how likely they are to recommend your brand to a friend (a Net Promoter Score).

You can also use this feedback to enhance your future brand activations beyond the now. With large datasets and more feedback responses, an AI helper is a must-have tool. AnyRoad’s Pinpoint uses AI to pull common words found across feedback (good and bad) to let you know which areas you can improve or where you’ve knocked it out of the park and can double down on. 

This area can help you with proper brand scaling, giving you a solid direction for growth on a worldwide scale that you might have yet to find otherwise.

Final Thoughts On Global Experiences 

Global brand activations and experiences are vital to any brand looking to reach the international stage. Navigating this realm takes a strategic blend of cultural sensitivity, innovative planning, and a commitment to data-driven insights. 

As brands aim to transcend regional lines, they must recognize the unique challenges of diverse markets and learn to be more flexible. By unifying their information through centralized data management, embracing local nuances, and understanding the challenges they face, global brand marketers can unlock the true potential of global brand activations.

Brands that harness the power of global activations will resonate with audiences worldwide and leave an indelible mark in the world of brand experiences. Let the journey toward unforgettable global activations continue!