The creative work you send out is how the world sees you. It’s the face and expression of your brand. If your creative teams in each market you serve are on their own to figure out how to say it and display it, your brand perception is likely to end up all over the place. That erodes brand trust because customers don’t have a clear and consistent read on how you’re relevant to their needs, wants and values.

So, you need central control to ensure brand discipline, right? A lean but mighty center of excellence at a corporate/global oversight level, led by seasoned award winning creative directors, art directors, copy directors and Creative Operations leaders. Talent with rich brand-level creative experience who understand brand architecture and live by your brand design system, guidelines and playbook. Right?

Maybe — but not so fast.

1. Don’t look up … without looking bottom-up.

You’re building a beautiful plan for a well-oiled, centralized corporate creative organization. A team that holds brand discipline sacred and ensures consistency across customer experiences.

A plan that’s likely to unravel if not first informed by inputs from your regional team leads.

Running full steam ahead without meaningful listening to in-market teams is a common misstep of large, centrally-run multi-regional and global organizations. But your local teams are in it — in the streets and restaurants and stores, playing on the field with your customers in that region. They understand the market experientially — from their own personal experiences being immersed in local culture, consumer behaviors, customs, languages and language nuances, references and market-specific influences on purchase behavior. They bring you fluency in how customers think and purchase locally that should show up in your creative to build trust with customer audiences in your regional markets.

Corporate is (at least for some regions) watching from an armchair. At a corporate level running a creative org, you can’t logistically be in enough of your regions for long enough or consistently enough to know what they know. Honor that, and hear them.

Your org should be in a regular cadence of periodic listening/feedback mechanisms with your teams. Even if you’ve not been disciplined about this before, it's a legitimate way to position an ask for input from your regional teams before you design your beautiful org and roll it out. Similar to employee performance feedback and quarterly account reviews with external agencies, you can legitimately position this Q&A as regularly scheduled programming.

To do this without saying the dreaded reorg word or causing panic, ask a cross-section of functional leads and people in regional trenches what is and isn’t working in the day to day making of your marketing assets. Ask what improvements they’d like to see in process, cross-team interaction and how corporate/global vs. regional work gets done. Ask what they’re doing today in terms of brand standards and consistency vs. regional relevance — and how they’re getting it done.

You need your in-market regional teams to discern when a global campaign wouldn’t play in their region and recommend a solution, whether that’s transcreation of creative, region-specific media plan or channel mix. They’re your lookouts for incoming corporate creative that simply isn’t right, or just not ready as is, for the region.

A great local team that feels seen, heard and respected will work much harder to serve your org in this way — and preserve the integrity of a brand level or multi-region campaign while fine-tuning how it resonates in their region. Empower them to do that. Spell it out explicitly in your RACI and creative process documentation that this is a key step, role and responsibility of your regional creative leads.

2. Take cross-regional trust building seriously.

The most successful regional marketing teams have a tight and symbiotic relationship with their global counterparts. They have honest, direct communication and a culture of respectful mutual support with corporate teams. They don’t blindly execute orders; they watch for regional red flags and missteps, and they share local experience-informed perspective that’s tough for corporate leaders to understand at their macro level across multiple regions.

Building trust between your global and regional teams is mission critical because it’s what gives your team members the confidence to play that lookout role. They have to call it when a campaign is just not going to work as-is in a given market. They have to critique, poke holes, play devil’s advocate. It’s often not welcome feedback, especially if adequate time isn’t baked into your process and timeline to afford regional renditions.

Invest in an objective assessment of your team’s level of trust across your regional and functional teams. Make trust-building workshops mandatory, and do them in person.

Face time matters here. You need everyone to feel safe being direct (constructive, yes — but also clear and direct) to make your creative the very best it can be. Your corporate and regional teams won’t feel safe doing that if they don’t have mutual trust. And they won’t develop trust if they don’t get to know each other on a human level.

Secure the T&E budget for travel across your regional markets. We know it’s tough, but it’s that important. Trust soars, teams work more effectively and creative quality increases when people who work together are physically in the same space together sometimes.

We’re not talking return to office here — that’s a separate conversation. This is about workshopping together. Eating meals together. Enjoying a team happy hour. Getting comfortable and being human. A team isn’t just people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other.

Disconnection equals dysfunction. Don’t let this happen to your team.

3. Find out what your team is really doing today and look for opportunities.

Delve into what your creative org members are actually doing. Don’t assume you know based on titles, levels or compensation. Again, ask and listen. Let them tell you what a week in their life in your org entails for them.

Not doing this can undermine respect for you as their leader, especially if you’re staging a reorg — and jeopardize the success of your grand plan.

A “Content Manager,” for example, can mean a lot of things and require very different experience, strengths and levels of responsibility than what leaders and HR might assume. Account manager and site operations responsibilities can end up on the plate of content managers, especially if marketing managers go directly to content managers to get digital content set up for distribution/go-live. Meanwhile they may be thought of strictly as copywriters by corporate/HR, while other teams are attributed credit for responsibilities the content managers are actually supporting.

Or you may have a team that’s been merged with another that leaves two people doing the same effective job but with different levels, titles and compensation. This erodes respect and trust across your org, so tackle this head on to correct inconsistencies.

A job families framework can help. Contact your HR partner, ask for a talent architecture review and provide your recommendations. They’ll ideally have a framework or template prefilled with detailed standardized creative roles and responsibilities for different titles and levels. Have your team leads such as creative directors assess these to make sure this framework reflects the reality of their teams’ day to day responsibilities. Champion consistency across teams and team members in terms of types of responsibilities expected of each level and title, including:

• Extent of thought leadership expected of them
• Extent of people management
• Extent and nature of vendor management responsibility
• Number of direct reports
• Size of team they lead
• What they actually do and create day to day

Now plug in your team members’ names and titles, levels and compensation. The disparities are easy to spot using this approach and will highlight key opportunities to ensure the integrity and success of your org optimization.

4. Design your org for transcreation (and local creation), not just translation.

Speaking the language isn’t enough. Being great and efficient at both global or “corporate” and local doesn’t start and stop at translation. Your in-market teams need talent qualified to assess your campaign message and execution holistically and advise you experientially on how it would be received — not just the words used and how they’re translated (or how badly), but all of it.

This includes images, videos, talent appearing in your photos and content, iconography, taglines … any creative choices that could make your brand seem tone deaf, not meaningful or relevant for a regional audience, disrespectful, offensive or lost in translation.

Bake holistic assessment of market-appropriateness into your SOP (standard operating procedure) too. Your creative operations process should include a trigger early-on in a project’s lifespan to invoke not only regional marketing managers but also local-expert creative and content leads and their teams to review the brief, attend the kickoff and give local-specific feedback on creative strategy.

Your regional creative teams may also need some team members in-market to be executional boots on the ground. This can be a small lean team with the responsibility, skills and experience to handle region-specific campaign creative execution. For example, identify resources for shooting video of local events and agile support for quick-turn local work that’s logistically tough to centralize at a corporate level if your regions span a wide range of time zones.

Blueprint for a multi-regional creative powerhouse

Listen bottom-up. Empower regional teams to advise you and refine your work locally. Build cross-regional trust and enable face time. Deeply understand what your team is really doing and responsible for. Set up your team up for true transcreation and agile local creation. These cornerstones of a smart org on the complex corporate-global-local stage can make your creative team a force of nature that drives customer engagement and brand love.