LATAM TRENDSETTERS: Cynthia McFarlane, President of Saatchi & Saatchi Latin America, discusses how culture is at the heart of innovation
Cynthia McFarlane, President of Saatchi & Saatchi Latin America and Chairperson of Conill, has spent several decades traveling throughout the western hemisphere and admits that the title of her memoir should read: If It's Monday, This Must be Mexico City. She's also developed a knack of picking up local accents, which means that she can quickly tell the difference between a compliment and an insult. In other words, she knows first-hand the importance of cultural distinctions.
In fact, Cynthia McFarlane is relying less on focus groups and surveys and more on "living with the masses" via a concept Saatchi calls Xploring. "Innovation has always been at the heart of everything we do as an enterprise. Today, it's just in hyperdrive, as if at some point the laws of physics changed and time sped up. The frequency and necessity of global branding makes understanding and interpreting cultural dynamics at the local and regional level paramount."
She admits that media proliferation has added greater complexity to marketing. This is not a complexity defined by more options, but in determining exactly how ideas are connecting with people in their delivered forms and what type of three-way engagement they inspire (brand to person, person to brand and person to person). This is a much more complicated algorithm than looking at channel penetration potential.
"We have been retooling the way we look at how people respond through mediums. It's certainly a work in progress, but we've been getting great results. A terrific recent example is the fabulous work of our Buenos Aires agency for Andes beer. It just won the outdoor Grand Prix at Cannes, in addition to media and promotional honors. The effort has become a cultural phenomenon in the region and serves as an example of how a BIG creative idea travels across any medium, because it truly has the power to connect with consumers"
Cynthia McFarlane admits that her biggest challenge is getting people to think AND, AND, AND. "This means looking for more--more tie-in's, more insights, more touchpoints, more engagement, and more consumer revelations, which are emotional at their foundation. Culture is the epicenter of all this. Innovation always happens at the edges before it becomes part of a brand's global DNA.
Take a look at the synonyms for innovation: novelty, improvement, advancement and perhaps a dozen others. What do they all have in common? ACTION. The best way to inspire positive action is through relentlessly challenging everything -- ourselves, our clients, our personal beliefs -- everything. My job is to challenge 1000 people in our Latin American network."
