I recently spoke with a marketing director at a large corporation. She talked about headquarters. About limitations. About the feeling that local teams often have little real influence.
As I listened, I remembered a story from 24 years ago.
It was 2002. I was VP Marketing at Carlsberg Poland. We were preparing to relaunch the Carlsberg brand on the Polish market.
The headquarters in Copenhagen already had a TV commercial ready. It was called “Subway”. It had been tested using the standard TV Link methodology and came with all the arguments one would expect from a global organisation: strong production values, strategic consistency, and research results that looked acceptable.
The commercial itself was elegant and aspirational.
A group of friends gets on a metro train. As the journey continues, different world capitals flash past the window: London, Rome, Moscow, a city somewhere in Asia. Finally, they get off in Jamaica and end up in a beach bar with cold bottles of Carlsberg in their hands.
It was cosmopolitan. It was polished. It was consistent with the global brand strategy.
But our team felt something was wrong. It looked good on paper, but it did not feel like the right story for the Polish consumer at that time.During one of Carlsberg’s internal conferences, we had also seen another commercial called “I Love You Baby”, produced by one of the local markets.
After just a few seconds, I felt that this was the commercial that could work in Poland.
The brand team had a similar reaction. We wanted to use it for the relaunch.
Headquarters, however, was not enthusiastic.
They wanted the high-budget “Subway” commercial to be used in as many markets as possible. There was also research from Poland suggesting that the commercial performed reasonably well.
But my instinct told me that something was not right. So I asked SMG KRC for the details of the research. And that is when we found the problem.
The respondents had been recruited from consumers of mainstream Polish beer brands, not from the brands Carlsberg was actually competing against at the time: Heineken and Pilsner Urquell.
And that mattered.
Back then, Pilsner Urquell was the leader of the premium beer segment in green bottles — the format in which international premium beers were sold in Poland.
In other words, the research had tested the commercial on the wrong competitive frame.
I wondered whether this was just an accident.
But the choice of mainstream beer drinkers instead of premium beer drinkers was simply too convenient to ignore. It looked less like a neutral research design and more like a setup that could produce the desired answer.
So I did something rather unpolitical. And, looking back, something that could probably have put my career in the company at risk. I commissioned a new test of both commercials.
This time, we recruited the right respondents: consumers of Heineken and Pilsner Urquell.
The result was clear.
“I Love You Baby” won decisively.
The “Subway” commercial performed significantly worse than it had in the original research.
We shared the new findings with headquarters. Eventually, they accepted our recommendation. The results of the campaign exceeded our expectations.
Within a year, Carlsberg’s market share in Poland grew from 0.1% to almost 1% — nearly a tenfold increase. I remembered this story after that recent conversation because it shows something important.
Local teams can influence headquarters. But it usually requires three things at the same time.
First, an instinct rooted in a deep understanding of the local consumer and the local market.
Second, the courage to challenge a recommendation from headquarters — even when that recommendation is supported by data, budgets and global alignment.
Third, the determination to find objective arguments that can test and validate your instinct.
Because instinct without data can be just an opinion. But data without instinct can lead you straight into a blind alley.
Tomasz Ziółkowski — brand strategist, former VP Marketing at Carlsberg Poland, consultant and MBA lecturer. I help companies build brands that do not have to compete on price.
