Transcreation - a Trojan Horse for centralization?

Is transcreation just a Trojan horse used by Global VPs of Marketing to wrest global campaign production responsibility away from the countries where they will be executed?

I guess the answer depends on how paranoid you are or how dictatorial your VP of Marketing is. My own view is that in the present competitive, budget constrained environment, both transcreation and centralization have individual merit when considering the best approach to global marketing campaign production and execution.

First and foremost transcreation requires an intimate knowledge of a local market and constant exposure to the local media. Many Belgians, Canadians and Swiss speak ‘French’, although any Parisian would happily debate this over a Ricard (Pastis) or two. However, the TV, Newspapers and culture in Brussels, Quebec, Lyons and Lausanne vary considerably.

QED: any creative translators participating in the transcreation process should reside in their native country.

Anyone for Pastis?

There has been a significant trend towards centralization of production of global marketing campaigns. Cost, time-to-market and control of messaging are all reasons regularly cited by clients I meet. My experience tells me that the management culture and organizational structure of the individual large international corporation does play a large part in this decision too.

It is not surprising that where a company has a strong directive, command and control approach to management and the brand the more likely it is to be heavily centralized. I am sure several brands spring immediately to mind?

What can be centralized? Well pretty much everything. What should be centralized? That will depend on several factors of which budget, time-to-market and availability of local resources are but three.

I regularly see the following aspects of global campaigns centralized:

• Creative and copywriting
• Production and resizing
• Media planning and purchase
• Supply chain management
• Transcreation management (but not the transcreation activity)
• SEO
• CRM

As a rough rule of thumb: if you operate in a few countries and have a few products then you can deliver quite happily without going down the centralization route. Most marketing activities can be done for each country, by each country, based on central guidelines. The opposite is obviously true where you operate in 20 plus countries and have several products and continuous campaigns.

The tricky part is moving from one approach to the other!  As for centralized transcreation activity – which is championed by the few – I would, like the cliché, avoid it like the plague. But then again I have never been a big fan of the committee approach to transcreation.