Trena Blair is the CEO of FD Global Connections, who advises companies on successfully scaling their businesses to the USA. Trena is She is also an Amazon number 1 Best Selling Author, International Gold Stevie Award Winner (2022 & 2023), US Growth Specialist, Global Mentor, and a Non-Executive Director.
Marketers and their agencies talk about brands all the time. There are discussions on brand awareness, brand equity and increasingly answering the questions of how brands contribute to the top-line growth and bottom-line profitability of a business.
Brands can be very different, from small boutique or niche brands right up to global behemoths know by millions of people. But what does it take to not just build a brand but to take it global?
Trena has the experience marketing some of the biggest Australian brands, but also the very biggest global brands too.
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Well, I’m not really sure that I broke the internet. I can’t quite put myself in the same league as Beyonce.
Transcription:
Darren:
Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder, and CEO of TrinityP3 Marketing Management consultancy. And welcome to Managing Marketing. A weekly podcast, we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.
If you’re enjoying the Managing Marketing Podcast, please either like, review, or share this episode to help spread the words of wisdom from our guests each week.
Marketing and marketers and their agencies talk about brands all the time. There are discussions on brand awareness, brand equity, and increasingly answering the questions of how brand contributes to top line growth and bottom-line profitability of a business.
Brands can be very different from small boutique or niche brands, right up to global behemoths known by millions of people. But what does it take to not just build a brand, but to take it global, my guest today has experience in this exact topic.
Not only does she have experience marketing some of the biggest Australian brands, but also the very biggest global brands too. She’s an Amazon number one bestselling author in Australia and the U.S., International Gold Stevie Award winner for 2022/23, U.S. Growth Specialist, global mentor, and non-executive director and advises companies on successfully scaling their businesses to the USA.
Please welcome to Managing marketing podcast, the CEO of FD Global Connections, Trena Blair, welcome, Trena.
Trena:
Hi, Darren, great to be here. Thanks very much for the opportunity to talk to you.
Darren:
And look, very impressive resume and huge breadth and depth of experience. But let’s start with number one best seller on Amazon. So, how do you achieve that?
Trena:
Well, actually, there’s a bit of story there because my audience obviously is in Australia, but it’s also the United States. And I lived over there for a number of years, and as I was thinking about launching my book, I wanted to launch it in Australia because that’s where many of my customers are. But also, I wanted to also launch it in the United States.
Now, for any of your listeners who’ve lived in the United States, or they’ve worked with businesses that have gone to the United States, one of the most important things is accolades. Americans love accolades, they love prizes and awards and so forth.
And so, I was working with a colleague in New York, and I said, “Look, I feel that I need to get some sort of accolade about my book in order for people to turn up to my book launch in Manhattan.” And she agreed.
So, I took my inspiration from Beyonce at the Super Bowl and Beyonce’s advertisement at the Super Bowl, or promotion at the Super Bowl was break the internet, could she break the internet? And so, I channeled Beyonce.
So, I had a campaign called Break the Internet. And I went out to all of my subscribers, my website subscribers around the world through FD Global, and I asked them to help me break the internet. And the goal was to secure Amazon Bestseller in Australia, but, and importantly number one best new release in the United States. And I achieved both. So, I couldn’t believe it.
Darren:
An amazing story and great inspiration there. Nothing like picking a winner to become a winner.
Trena:
Yeah. That’s right. Well, I’m not really sure that I broke the internet. I can’t quite put myself in the same league as Beyonce, but nevertheless, I achieved the outcome that I was looking for.
Darren:
Or who’s the other person that broke the internet? Kim Kardashian.
Trena:
Yes.
Darren:
Now, it’s interesting because you are very aware, obviously from living and working in the U.S. how important it is to actually establish credentials to do business in the U.S.
And look, I think there’s a lot of Australian businesses that eye the U.S., Australia has 27 million people approximately, the U.S. is over 300 million. So, it’s just seems like this huge potential market that allows you to scale rapidly if you crack it.
But there’s a lot of rocks on the way, isn’t there? There’s a lot of things that most people don’t actually understand in doing that.
Trena:
Look, there is, and we’ll get to how I talk to my clients and work with my clients about building their brand in the U.S. but there are things that we need to do before we actually get into the U.S. And one of the things which we focus on is doing a brand asset audit on their Australian business and look at the assets that they’ve got in their Australian business.
And if the head of marketing or head of brand is looking to utilize those same assets in the U.S., we critically assess whether they’re relevant or not.
So, for example, there was one organization we worked with that … actually there were two lessons with this one organization. So, the photography that they had was about 10-years-old. And it was your typical family at that time. The Anglo-Saxon mom and the white dad and the two white children.
Darren:
Yeah. We call it Whitebread. The Whitebread family. Yeah.
Trena:
Right, right. Look, that worked beautifully for this business all those years ago. But of course, today we have all types of families, they’re blended families. And certainly, in the U.S., what we recommended was new photography to represent the modern family.
And so, that was one lesson that they went through. The other piece again, with that same company was the social media channels that they were using in Australia. They were very successful. They used Instagram.
Now, as we researched their target market in the United States, the social media channel that their target market was buying from was Facebook. So, again, we had to look at all of their brand assets and accommodate that to the United States.
A big problem I see with Australian companies and UK companies is they simply pick their brand up and drop it in the U.S. as it is, without really understanding the market.
Darren:
And it is not just a single universal market. Is it? It’s actually multiple markets. You can’t think of the U.S. as just one marketplace, can you?
Trena:
No, absolutely. There are 50 states in the U.S., each of them are different. And as I’m doing workshops with organizations, I have this really great slide. It’s one of my most popular slides where every state has the equivalent of the GDP of a country around the world.
So, for example, California’s equivalent is the UK in GDP terms. Texas is the equivalent of Canada. Minnesota is the equivalent of Russia. Now, if you step back from that for just one moment, and think about if I’m looking at Minnesota, but think of it in terms of Russia from a GDP perspective, you start thinking about if I was launching in Russia, what are the things I would have to do?
I’d have to understand the culture, I’d have to understand the language, I’d have to understand the regulation and the compliance, et cetera, et cetera. And this is the way that I get my clients to think about the United States, because one of the biggest traps is they think the United States is one market and it isn’t.
Darren:
And I think that’s because most people that grew up in Australia grew up with Hollywood being the main source of U.S. culture. Which is quite a very narrow view of the U.S., isn’t it? It’s almost like Disneyland in that it’s a sanitized version that gives you one spectrum of what is an incredibly broad spectrum of beliefs and lifestyles and values and things.
Trena:
Yes, absolutely. It’s stark the differences. And when we moved to New York we could not believe how stark the differences were in language, in the way that you do business. And the written language contracts, business contracts, the phraseology on business contracts can be really misleading for Australians as we come to understand how those contracts work.
So, I always say to my clients if you need your contracts reviewed, get a U.S. lawyer. Sure, there are Australian lawyers here, they can read, they can write, but they don’t understand the U.S. phraseology and terms. And so, clients can get themselves into trouble by not utilizing the experts in that market.
Darren:
Absolutely. Now, we’ve been talking about largely the differences, but with your marketing pedigree and the idea of the role of brand, most strong brands have a very consistent presentation, don’t they?
You don’t try and create variations of a brand. You try and find what’s common. So, what is it about successful global brands, for instance, when you think about the top 10 top of mind global brands, what is it about those brands that really lend themselves or contribute to success in multiple markets?
Trena:
Yeah, it’s a really interesting area, and I’m sure many of your listeners have got some experience with this as well. But from where I sit what really distinguishes, I think, some of those big brands that we all know of is that they look at the entire customer experience from the moment that the eyeballs are on the internet and then not at client through to that experience after the purchase, and then follow up and so forth.
There is consistency. Whatever channel that their clients access their business, it is the consistency in their sales processes, their relationship processes, everything is consistent from that very early engagement through to loyal customer.
And I think their entire experience, the customer experience is around showing what they do, not telling what they do. And so, that’s a really, really important key ingredient I think for even the smaller brands to think about are they showing the experience, not telling the experience?
Are the clients experiencing that? And being able to talk about that to their friends and other colleagues. I had a great experience.
But also, some of these big brands do get it wrong, by the way, Darren, as we know. And if we talk about one or two of those the one I kind of like, which is one of the most popular and big brand car brands, Mercedes-Benz. So, when they first launched in China under the brand named Benzi, it actually means rush to die.
Darren:
Now I can see how that happens because they would’ve taken the name and then looked for the Chinese characters that sound similar without actually considering when they come together. Because by the sounds of it, it sounds like it’s two characters.
Trena:
Yeah. Benz-i.
Darren:
Yeah. Benz-i comes together and then meaning, and often in China or Mandarin the context is what gives it the meaning, the words around it. So interesting.
And look, it is interesting, isn’t it? Because earlier on you mentioned about the way your Australian brand was representing what was probably an outdated traditional view of the family. The market and consumers are much more sensitive to what they see as exclusion or at least non-inclusion in the way that you present yourself.
And we’ve seen brands, and I think it was Dolce and Gabbana were ostracized and pillared in China for what was seen as cultural appropriation and a misuse of many of the cultural symbols of China.
It really is quite important, isn’t it? You can have a consistent brand expression. But the way that you actually apply it to different markets needs to be handled very carefully and sensitively.
Trena:
It does. Absolutely. And I mentioned earlier about the customer experience, the end-to-end customer experience. There was an organization that came to me several years ago now, a tech company, and they were very successful, or they are very successful in Australia, and they launched into Texas.
That was right. They did their research; they knew that was the target state. But they reached out to me because they were getting negative feedback from their clients in the United States and also in Australia.
And one thing about when you are a foreign company launching into a new market, one of the things you don’t want to do is start having clients question the value of your brand. But this client of mine was getting that feedback from customers.
So, when I researched it, what I saw was that the team in Melbourne was actually supporting the team from a customer experience perspective in Texas.
And they were working literally around the clock. They were exhausted. And so, their level of service, not only was it impacting Australian clients because they were getting that negative feedback, but it was also having a very significant impact on their new clients in the new market in the U.S.
And so, they had to pull back, they had to put in place a service team that worked the U.S. hours. I think they put one or two representatives on in Texas to be able to manage those clients who understand the language, who understand how to say sorry in that market.
So, that’s what I mean by the total customer experience, if you can have great taglines and so forth. But it’s the delivery of that, and you are showing how that works.
Darren:
It is interesting how we are much more comfortable as consumers, and this is human nature, when we feel that the people we are dealing with share values or share experience or even down to accents.
I know some people, and I’ve used this myself in the U.S. that there’s a novelty value having an Australian accent in the us particularly on the east and west coast.
But that will only get you so far. If they’re talking to someone that has their accent or closer to it, there’s a sense of shared values or shared life experience that makes people feel much more comfortable.
Trena:
Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been in situations where I’ve been representing a client in New York and I’ve finished the presentation and I’ll say, “So, are there any questions?” And they said, “Well, no, but we just want you to keep talking because we love your accent.” So, that’s kind of sweet.
But yeah, look, Americans love Australians and we’ve got a great relationship with them at political level, business level, right throughout society. So, it’s relatively easy to get that first meeting.
But if you are not able to articulate your commitment to the market, then it’s very challenging for Australian business leaders to go to the next step, which is a follow up meeting, the demo and so forth.
So, you have to remember, most businesses around the world want to be successful in the biggest economy in the world, and therefore you have to think about the U.S. as a revolving door of entrepreneurs.
So, when you go over there as an Australian, you’re going to receive an amazing response. Every business that I’ve worked with will go over, they’ll come back, and they’ll say it was absolutely brilliant. They’re looking forward to the next follow ups.
But what happens is that is the culture of America. They welcome innovation, they welcome those who are pushing boundaries, and they’re enthusiastic about that.
But because it’s a one-off meeting, you’ve not spent that time building the relationship, you haven’t spent time building your network, then it’s very difficult to get traction after that. So, building that network, building those relationships, and really understanding the market from a cultural perspective is essential before businesses launch.
Darren:
Now there’s an ongoing discussion in the marketing profession, let’s call it a profession, even though it’s technically not, but in the marketing profession about the role of brand in long-term business building and short-term sales, and getting that balance right.
If you are launching into a new market, is there a consideration of, should you be looking at primarily driving those early engagements and sales as proof of concept? Or should you be doing the brand building upfront to get the sales? Or both?
Trena:
You have to do both. And there are strategies that businesses can put in place to be able to achieve both. So, for example make sure first of all, that you’ve got all your assets that are aligned to the market. So, we spoke about that earlier.
Once you’ve got that, once you’ve also identified where are the conferences, the trade shows, where your clients are going to be, have your assets ready to go into those. If you can become a keynote speaker, if you can host a particular event at the conference, then that’s building your brand. It’s building awareness of the product or the service that you are offering.
And that’s going to start getting people talking about what you are doing. But as you are doing that, it’s not only about starting to build the brand and awareness of that, it’s also your reconnaissance.
Who are the thought leaders in the industry, who are the potential ambassadors of your brand? And these are the people who know the industry and that they can support you moving forward. So, whilst you’re all doing that, there will be sales focus and brand building at the same time.
So, it’s a combination in my mind. It comes down to budget, of course, so sales are the most imperative because that brings a revenue and that allows you to do certain things. But for me, the clients that do this really well, as they go into the U.S., do a combination.
Darren:
And does this apply just to B2B? Or is it also applicable to B2C and are your client’s inclined to be one or the other, or both?
Trena:
When I first started it was B2B, because that was my corporate background in financial services. But I now work with B2C as well. And the process is very similar. The differences are the distribution.
So, as a B2C, you’ve got three PLs and distributors and so forth that you need to identify, whereas that’s not the case in a B2B. So, it’s the distribution and the sales models that are different, but the way that they think about preparing for the market launch from a brand and marketing perspective is very similar.
Darren:
Now we talk about long-term brand building, but the interesting thing, and one of the things that you shared with me before this conversation was that company lifespan on the S&P 500 is actually dropped.
Trena:
Yes, yes.
Darren:
It’s interesting, isn’t it?
Trena:
It is. It is. And brand loyalty has a lot to do with that. A lot also has to do with the innovation culture of those organizations. So, think about Kodak and making sure that as brand specialists and marketing specialists working with product management and not being afraid of speaking up with new ideas, with innovations that you’re seeing with competitors, bringing those to the table, that’s really going to help the longevity and long-term viability, I think.
Everybody in the organizations need to be contributing to those conversations. And because of the deep research skills that brand and marketing professionals have innately got, they’re in a really good spot to be able to contribute to those conversations.
Darren:
Right. So, because we have seen the tech companies, for instance, that have arisen, and people seem to forget that it was only this century, which is only 24 years ago, we saw the rise of the tech companies who seem to dominate the landscape.
But then underpinning that in the S&P 500, there are lots and lots of companies that feel like they’ve been around forever, but they actually are inclined to change and mold. There’s a growth through acquisition, merger and acquisition, but not a lot of them that are driving new product development or innovation are there.
Trena:
Yeah. And a lot of that has to do with the culture in the organization. From my own experience, when I was working in corporate product managers have a P&L that they manage and there’re metrics and there’re bonuses are based on those metrics.
So, there’s a lot of protectionism of their P&Ls. So, of course for them, if they don’t have metrics around innovation or re-engineering or transformation, they’re not going to focus on what’s going on externally. They’re not going to have a lens on new technology that potentially could disrupt their entire business.
So, there’s always this tension between your product manager and the metrics. And often businesses create new teams and they’re the innovators. They’re the ones that are going to drive the future and bring new technology in. And we will be viable in 50 odd years’ time.
But there is that conflict between the two. And the organizations that I think do this really well are those that encourage those metrics and those outcomes across all individuals, all staff members in the organization. The big tech companies do this really, really well. And I think that’s why they continue to be at the forefront of innovation.
Darren:
Yeah. It is quite an old fashioned model where innovation sort of ended up being pushed as companies got bigger and bigger. Innovation was pushed over into product development marketing.
Whereas the operations, their role was to really become more efficient and cost cutting. Then we’ve seen something similar happen, the cost cutting after they’ve cut the costs out of operations, they then started focusing on cutting the cost of marketing and innovation and product development.
Trena:
Yeah. That’s right. We’re seeing time and time again. And the other trend that I see is that some executives being recruited by some of these more traditional companies to try to build that culture of innovation.
And again, you can’t rely on one individual to come into an organization to change a culture. It really does come down to the metrics and the KPIs that everybody is measured on.
So, in some of these big tech companies everybody has the opportunity of creating a new product. Every single staff member, doesn’t matter which department you’re in.
And then what they do is every year or every six months, each staff member has an opportunity to pitch that to their line executive. If they win that pitch, then it goes up to the c-suite.
And typically, three to four of those innovations that have been voted to go up to c-suite are the ones that get the full funding, backing of staff, and they’re the ones that are driving the innovation. So, that’s how the big tech companies are doing that.
Darren:
It’s interesting, again, because we often think of innovation and the startup as being the exciting part of the business, and yet time and time again, we are still seeing very large companies have the market dominance to actually block, or often they’ll acquire the startups.
We’ve seen this in the area that your career was focused on, financial services. The rise of the fintech, there’s been some great innovations in that area only to see it acquired and then shelved.
Trena:
Yeah.
Darren:
Which you can only do is a dominant player, can’t you? You can’t afford to buy a potentially threatening startup. And just shelve it unless you’ve got significant market muscle.
Trena:
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. And yes, we’ve unfortunately seen that a lot. And in Australia, unfortunately, what we’ve also seen is that … and I’m not going to focus on any particular industry here, but we do see market dominance and blocking of startups, their ideas.
And I know a couple of examples where those startups have been blocked, if you like, and they’ve actually picked up the entire team and gone overseas where they’ve got funding and supported.
So, I think having said all that, I do think that the startup scene in Australia has matured quite a bit. If I think back to 10 years ago when I started FD Global, then it was quite a new ecosystem, but we’ve got 10 years in, we are seeing some excerpts, we are seeing some great companies, Australian companies launch successfully and build businesses overseas. But we need to see more of that.
Darren:
There is an issue around the size of this market, isn’t there, while it’s a great place for innovation and people with ideas. There’s a high-risk profile because it’s a relatively small market globally speaking where if someone backs the wrong one there’s an embarrassment about it.
Whereas the U.S. does — you sort of alluded to it before, they’re inclined to embrace something new. And if it fails, it fails, they just move on to the next one.
Trena:
Yeah, absolutely. There are two things I think are happening here, Darren, I think, one is the whole tall poppy syndrome, which is prevalent in Australia. So, there’s that.
Australia is 0.33% of the total population of the world. We are a small market, but with that comes a strength. And that strength is, if you are successful in Australia, then the Americans appreciate that we are a small market, a challenging market from that respect.
And if you win a big financial service company or a big insurance company or a big retailer account, then you’re onto something pretty special and they respond to that. So, that’s the positive.
But we do need to normalize failure. We need to normalize failure. Americans, I don’t want to say they love failure, because that would be totally wrong, definitely the wrong language, but they accept that not everything is going to go well all the time. And they’re very good at learning from that.
And so, if you’ve got a startup and it fails what they do is they look at the founder, they go, “Okay, what did you learn from that? How are you going to apply that to your next startup?”
In Australia, we just treat failure as a real negative and it is holding us back. So, tall poppy syndrome and the fact that we haven’t normalized failure, I think are two areas that we definitely could be doing a lot better at. And taking a leaf out of the Americans book.
Darren:
Well, it is quite English of us. I think, the English have a similar tall poppy syndrome and failure is not an option. And I can’t remember who said it, but they said, in venture capital or private equity in the U.S. if you haven’t failed at least three times, they consider you haven’t even tried.
Trena:
You haven’t even started. Yeah.
Darren:
But it’s almost a badge of progress that you’ve been pushing the boundaries and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.
Trena:
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, absolutely.
Darren:
It’s interesting because I know the government in Australia is about to release plans on how to build manufacturing of the future. And I almost feel like for a long time, various governments have been talking about turning us into the smart country or the clever country and things like that. It’s almost like perhaps they’ve given up.
Trena:
Yeah, it is. It is. I don’t know. It’s an interesting time for Australia, manufacturing was shut down, literally we lost that industry. But now I think with climate change and the environmental impact that we’re all seeing, Australia has a great opportunity there.
And if manufacturing is part of that broader solution to assist not only Australia, but offer those solutions to the world, then I think that’s a really positive thing. And part of that is manufacturing. So, we, I think as a nation, have a great competency in that we’ve proven that it was lost, but hopefully we can get back to that.
Darren:
So, Trena I’m just noticing the time and we need to probably finish soon, but I’d be really interested if there was someone listening to this podcast, and we have a lot of independent advertising agencies that could be thinking about expanding their business to other markets as others have.
There could be marketers working for an Australian brand and thinking about moving that into other markets for growth. What’s the starting point? You mentioned earlier doing an audit to see if the — but really what should they be thinking about? What’s the consideration list before someone for instance, contacted you for advice?
Trena:
Yeah. First of all, what I would say is look at who your clients are today. So, if you’ve been in business only two years, and you are still building your brand in Australia, you are yet to secure what I call a marquee brand. Then you need to continue working in Australia to secure that.
So, what I’m getting at there is, it is easier for an Australian business or a UK business to go into an international market with a customer list of businesses that that market knows. So, if an agency is looking to go into Manhattan and they’ve got a customer like, and I’m just pulling one out of the air, a Westpac, they know Westpac in Manhattan, there’s an office there.
And so, there’ll be that resonance. So, having a marquee client or a couple of marquee clients that are recognized in the United States is really positive.
And the other piece around that is if you have a client in Australia that also has a representation or HQ in the United States, that’s also a really positive. So, when you are pitching, these are the sorts of things that Americans will look for and recognize that “This is a strong Australian company. I know that brand, so they must be doing something interesting.”
So, that would be one of the first things. I’d also say that don’t rush. This is not a project that you can simply launch in two months, three months’ time. One of the mistakes I see is businesses field that they have to get everything done and within a very short period of time. And that’s not the case.
You don’t have to get all your insurances until you’ve got a client. You don’t have to register your Delaware until a certain point. So, making sure that you actually understand what that timeframe looks like is also important.
Darren:
Yeah. Excellent advice. Thanks for making time and joining us today. Trena Blair from FD Global Connections. How can people find you, Trena?
Trena:
We have a website, so www.fdglobal.com.au. I’m also on LinkedIn and I’m very active on LinkedIn. So, Trena with an e, Trena Blair. So, connect with me on LinkedIn, or you can follow us on LinkedIn at FD Global. So, a couple of different ways.
Darren:
And you’re about to get on airplane and fly to New York for your book launch.
Trena:
I am indeed. I am indeed.
Darren:
Well, good luck with that.
Trena:
Thanks Darren. Appreciate that.
Darren:
Hope it’s a huge success.
Trena:
Yeah. Thank you.
Darren:
Before you go, in the last five years, is there an Australian brand that you think has gone into the U.S. particularly well?