How can one global brand stay relevant to different audiences?

A child using a Crayola app and a teacher choosing classroom materials have different expectations of the same brand. International licensing partners face another challenge when developing experiences for customers whose preferences may differ from those in the company’s home market. Yet everyone involved needs to understand what makes the experience recognizably Crayola.

The challenge is familiar to international companies whose brands are represented by people working in different functions and markets. Global brand consistency means maintaining a recognizable identity across those experiences while allowing teams to respond to the needs of their audiences. Achieving it requires agreement on what the brand stands for and a clear understanding of how much freedom individual teams have to adapt its expression.

For Victoria Lozano, who spent 17 years at Crayola and was named Fast Company’s 2025 CMO of the Year, managing those differences required a shared understanding of creativity that could guide decisions across the business. The approach she describes as borrow and build gives teams a common brand narrative while allowing them to develop communications and experiences suited to their audiences.

The business case for brand consistency

Research from Kantar provides evidence of the commercial value associated with consistent brand perceptions. Its 2025 analysis found that brands with more consistent consumer perceptions enjoyed a 111% advantage in brand-value growth over those perceived less consistently. The findings establish a relationship between consistency and long-term brand performance, although they do not demonstrate that a particular approach to brand management produces a defined financial return.

Maintaining that consistency becomes harder as organizations grow. Teams may have access to approved creative assets and detailed guidelines, but the people producing content still need to interpret those standards for their audiences. A global campaign may require substantial changes before it is appropriate for a particular market, while customer experiences developed by commercial partners introduce decisions that a central marketing team may not control directly.

A 2026 Visme study illustrates some of these difficulties. Based on a survey of 607 brand owners and content creators at mid-market companies across four countries, it found that 42% of content creators had distributed material before discovering it was off-brand. Meanwhile, 62% of brand owners kept their guidelines in at least three different places. The research highlights how maintaining a consistent identity can become difficult even when an organization has documented standards.

For multinational businesses, responsibility for the brand extends well beyond marketing. Product teams influence the customer experience, while external partners may represent the business in markets where headquarters has limited direct involvement. Decisions made across those relationships can influence how customers perceive the same company.

LEGO provides an example of how an established global brand has addressed this organizational challenge. In December 2016, its owners created the LEGO Brand Group to oversee the long-term protection and development of the brand. Its responsibilities extended across LEGO’s core business and education activities, including how the brand was represented through the LEGO Foundation and LEGOLAND attractions. The structure recognized that different businesses could influence the long-term value of the same brand, even when their commercial responsibilities differed.

How Crayola uses one brand narrative across different audiences

At Crayola, Victoria managed a brand that served audiences with different relationships to creativity. Children might associate the brand with play and imagination, while educators were interested in how creative activities could support learning. Parents brought their own expectations, influenced by what they wanted their children to gain from those experiences.

Speaking on the In Other Words podcast Victoria explains how those different motivations should connect to the same brand narrative.

“There needs to be a core part of your positioning and your narrative that is incredibly consistent. But then, for a kid that manifests itself this way. For a teacher, here’s why teachers care about this. For parents, it’s around true parental aspiration for their kids.”

At Crayola, creativity provided that common foundation. What it meant to a five-year-old was different from what it meant to a teacher, but those interpretations could contribute to a shared understanding of the brand. Victoria described them as different entry points into a larger idea.

Her borrow-and-build approach addressed how that principle could be applied across the business. Teams borrowed from an established understanding of what Crayola represented and developed experiences relevant to their audiences.

“You borrow because it is based on what the brand really represents and stands for, but you build in executing consistently in elevating within each space.”

The building took place within each part of the business. Creativity could be expressed through an educational resource or a physical attraction, with the experience designed around the needs of the people using it. A family visiting a Crayola Experience venue might expect an immersive environment, while a teacher selecting classroom materials would evaluate their educational value. Both needed to reinforce Crayola’s broader identity.

This required the teams responsible for each activity to understand the reasoning behind the brand’s positioning. A consistent visual identity could help customers recognize Crayola, but the way the company delivered on its promise depended on decisions made by people throughout the organization.

For executives managing brands across different businesses, the question is how much direction should come from the center and how much discretion individual teams should have. The central organization can establish the narrative and standards that protect the brand, while those responsible for individual audiences need enough understanding and authority to develop experiences that make sense to their customers.

Why global brand strategy needs local input

One of the difficulties of international brand management is deciding when regional teams become involved in developing the strategy. Headquarters may establish the positioning and commission creative work before local marketing teams are asked to adapt it. If the approach relies on assumptions that do not hold in every market, those teams may have little opportunity to influence decisions that have already been approved.

Victoria argues that local and cross-functional participation needs to begin much earlier. In discussing the relationship between global strategy and the teams responsible for implementing it, she explained why simply handing over an established strategy can create problems.

“This should not be a handover point. When it’s done well, it’s done with key cross-functional stakeholders being actively engaged and having that participation and co-ownership so that the embedment and the change management that needs to happen works a lot more smoothly.”

Her argument extends beyond marketing. Product and commercial teams may need to adapt their activities in response to a brand decision, particularly when it affects the customer experience. Involving those functions during planning allows the organization to identify the wider implications before commitments have been made.

At Crayola, understanding audience motivations informed how different parts of the business developed communications and experiences. The same principle applied internationally, where regional partners could identify differences in consumer expectations that affected how an experience should be designed.

A 2024 World Federation of Advertisers benchmark examined how multinational marketers maintain consistency across global creative platforms. Participating organizations reported using shared strategies and guidelines to support local adaptation, while governance arrangements for external agency partners remained an area requiring attention.

For international companies, shared ownership also requires clarity about accountability. Regional teams may understand how local customers respond to a message, while central leadership remains responsible for protecting the brand’s identity. Bringing those groups into the planning process helps establish where adaptation is appropriate and which decisions require wider agreement.

How much freedom should local markets have?

The question of local autonomy becomes particularly important when adapting a brand affects the customer experience or the economics of the business. Victoria encountered this during Crayola’s international development of location-based entertainment, where licensing partners needed to create experiences appropriate for their markets while maintaining the identity of the Crayola brand.

Some elements of an attraction were essential to how the brand was recognized, while others could be adapted according to local conditions. Victoria discussed how differences in technology adoption and consumer demographics could influence which activities would appeal to customers. Purchasing power was another consideration because it affected pricing and the commercial viability of the experience.

The underlying Crayola concept could provide a foundation for international expansion, but individual markets needed room to respond to these differences. Victoria saw an opportunity for locally developed experiences to benefit the wider business.

“You might have some signature experiences that travel, but based on those cultural contexts, what unique experiences might they develop that ultimately could come back and be implemented elsewhere in the world?”

A successful experience created for one market could offer something valuable to other regions, potentially reducing development costs while improving the wider offering. Victoria also considered the commercial value of allowing regional teams to contribute their knowledge.

“If you can have a lead market establish that starting point, but have other markets being able to apply and also feedback, not only does it produce a better experience, but it helps reduce the development and the operational cost.”

For multinational businesses, these arrangements require agreement on which elements of the brand are essential and which decisions local teams can make independently. Regional partners may have a better understanding of what customers will pay for or which experiences are commercially viable, while headquarters remains responsible for maintaining the brand’s identity.

The opportunity is for those regional decisions to inform the wider business. Companies need a way to evaluate successful local initiatives and determine whether they should be adopted in other markets. That allows knowledge developed by individual teams to contribute to future planning rather than remaining within the market where it originated.

Maintaining brand consistency across languages

Brand governance becomes more difficult to implement when communications and customer experiences need to be delivered across multiple languages. Regional teams may rely on different content systems, and guidelines developed centrally may not account for how messages will be interpreted in individual markets. When language requirements are considered only after creative decisions have been finalized, content can require substantial revision.

The company is now working toward involving international markets earlier in campaign development. Its experience reinforces the importance of considering local audiences while messages and experiences are still being designed, particularly when the brand’s positioning depends on delivering a consistent standard of quality across markets. Jason Hemingway, CMO of Phrase argues

“Marketers meed to stop treating language as a technical constraint and start treating it as a creative multiplier.”

In his article for CMO Alliance, he explains why language expertise should influence content planning from the outset, when teams can still shape how a message connects with different audiences.

For global brand leaders, this also has implications for content operations. Teams need reliable access to current brand guidance and the ability to adapt communications without repeatedly reconstructing the original message. Shared language infrastructure can support those requirements, but the organization still needs to establish how local teams participate in making decisions about the brand.

Measuring brand consistency across markets

Brand governance is often assessed through compliance with approved guidelines, but executives also need to understand how effectively the organization applies those standards. Customer research can establish whether different audiences continue to recognize the same underlying brand, even when its expression varies across markets.

Operational measures can provide further insight. Repeated revisions caused by local requirements identified late in the process may indicate that regional teams need earlier involvement in planning. Delays in approving relatively minor adaptations can reveal uncertainty over decision-making authority, while recurring inconsistencies in customer-facing content may suggest that teams lack access to appropriate guidance.

Companies should also examine whether successful initiatives developed in one market are being evaluated for use elsewhere. Victoria’s experience with Crayola’s international licensing partners demonstrates the potential value of sharing those developments across the business. Allowing local teams to contribute ideas that improve the wider offering can help reduce future development costs while strengthening the experience for customers.

Victoria also reflected on the longer-term consequences of brand decisions, recalling how established businesses could continue benefiting from choices made decades earlier.

“The things that we’re exploring today, the way that we evolve the brand, the way that we grow the business, what can it look like twenty, thirty years from now?”

For executives, maintaining brand consistency requires considering how decisions made across the business will influence the identity customers recognize over time. Crayola’s borrow-and-build approach offers a way to connect that responsibility with the freedom individual teams need to respond to their audiences.

As more people become responsible for representing a brand, its long-term strength depends on whether they share an understanding of what it stands for and have a meaningful role in shaping how it develops. That includes recognizing when local knowledge can improve experiences delivered elsewhere in the business while protecting the identity that connects them.