COMMENT: Ask the customer if global creative work is good enough?

After signing a US$2 billion deal for the worldwide promotional rights to the Star Wars trilogy in the late '90s, PepsiCo Foods international vice-president Irwin Gordon declared a key insight about the global attributes of the Doritos corn chip brand: "We've learned that teens everywhere understand Doritos in the same way and we're marketing the brand to those commonalities in perception."

It's an argument most marketers in multinational companies are familiar with. The strategic framework for launching and managing global brands can be strikingly similar across continents.

But the big question, particularly for this region, is that while fixed criteria for brand strategy might be globally apt, what goes for the creative execution?

Global creative does have its place in two areas:

At the top end of the socio-demographic scale we find celebrity faces which front much of the advertising for the world's leading fragrance, beauty care and fashion labels. And some also argue that those in global tribes linked closely with trade, travel and technology trends are also more easily captured with global creative executions. Unisys and Oracle are two cases in point.

Youth and/or challenger brands also lend themselves to global creative homogeneity. The latter is often referred to as the 'MTV Generation' where kids gravitate to and embrace Western culture. A recent example is the pairing of Pepsi and Britney Spears, and we can see the high-tech, visual involvement of the computer games people as well.

But it is the huge mass market in the middle that can be very hit and miss for global marketers. And therefore I suspect where a huge amount of marketing investment is wasted. As we spin ever faster in this global world, do we all understand the psyche, the nuances, subtleties and cynicism of our vast population and the lessons we can learn from them?

Sadly, the answer to most of these things is no.

And all too often, while it may seem initially prudent, marketers are lifting international creative work, that may have 'tested' and attained the appropriate scores in Baltimore or Birmingham and just hope similar results are achieved in Beijing. The criticism towards many of these types of global campaigns, however, has been what some call the 'CNNing' of international creative. If you don't capture attention, how do you engage?

Against this is the success of Procter & Gamble's Pantene brand.

Pantene's growth has been faster at periods when local advertising worked in combination with global activity. At the heart of this is 'real women, talking about real experiences and showing real results'. First launched in Australia in 1998 and now embraced across the region with outstanding results.

So is global good for you? Just ask your customers.