Truly internationalised customer marketing

The brief

Hertz Europe car rental is a major travel sector business with over 4m vehicle rentals per year across Europe.  With a mixture of ‘corporately owned’ markets including the big five – UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain; plus independent franchised markets including Sweden, Portugal, Austria the need for leadership is clear, but the reality across diverse markets and businesses is a real challenge.

Viasat Broadcasting operates free-TV and pay-TV in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, with emerging market operations in the Baltics, Russia and the Ukraine.   In total Viasat operates pay-TV platforms in 35 markets.  The emerging Eastern European markets are fast paced and dynamic, with multiple languages, with social, regulatory and political challenges, and with distinctive local cultures.

For both businesses, local staffing is of high quality and mixed experience.  Local senior management has authority to make decisions – so the inevitable tension between ‘the centre’ and the local markets is an important factor to manage, as it is for all international businesses.

Strategy

What role works best?  To lead and co-ordinate from the centre it’s important to recognise and to be ready to manage the tension between the centre and local operations.  Options include acting as policeman or preacher or teacher.  In truth the centre has to be ready to adapt to act in each of the three roles depending on the situation, but building working relationships with local management based on trust, respect and commitment is key.

Which people?  An important step at the beginning is to map out the range of stakeholders centrally and locally, in different functions and at different levels of seniority.  As a particular area of focus, local senior management need to be engaged early and regularly.

Actions

Where to start?  Listening to opinions and gathering information leads to a quick understanding of the markets and of the local issues.  This ‘factbase build’ has to come first.

Sharing the thinking – the next stage at Hertz and at Viasat was then to play back issues and conclusions.  This demonstrates understanding and starts to build agreement.  Shaping and adjusting the thinking to incorporate further feedback adds to this by sharing ownership of the conclusions.  This is the stage where hard work and commitment lead to an emerging consensus view – a ‘best fit’ strategy.

The next stage was to scope and plan the project – and here project management methods can work very well.  At Hertz with Project MIDAS, and at Viasat with Project AMBACTIA positioning the proposals as a development project gives a higher profile and more traction throughout the business.

At Viasat it was important to confirm local management and senior level support for the project at this stage.  So we created an internal video-diary type film, deliberately ‘low tech’ to use in launching the project to staff, but also to reaffirm management commitment to the strategy.

The big difference

The process itself leads to increasing focus and motivation, through the benefit of agreeing a clear shared strategy across different markets.  The shared strategy leads to a shared management agenda, so that markets can exchange learnings and define best practice.

At Hertz and at Viasat within 3 months, thanks to good progress across the agreed agenda and priorities, performance against business plan had turned round from behind to ahead.  This laid foundations for above target performance throughout the year.

Overall the biggest difference is to have shifted the management culture to embrace a clear strategy, agreed priorities, a performance measurement mindset, high levels of communication, and a long term development agenda.  This degree of professional discipline drives individual performance, team performance and therefore business performance.

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