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OpinionsIn their new global campaign launched in July, Back Market founder, Thibaud Hug de Larauze, swears on his mother's life that their phones are expertly refurbished and tested. If they break that promise, everything she owns goes to customers.
The campaign introduces a new playful direction within an approach that Back Market has followed for well over a year, marking a shift from the preceding period. So what has changed in how Back Market markets itself? And what actually keeps a fast-scaling brand consistent across global markets?
A new era for Back Market
In conversation with Will Poskett on Behind the Brand earlier this summer, Back Market's Head of Marketing Europe, Luke Forshaw, described their previous marketing as "quite scattergun with our messages and our sentiment" and indicated that repeated changes to taglines, their visual world and logo meant people didn't recognise messages as coming from the same brand.
But in the last few years, the brand has held to a consistent positioning and visual system. Campaigns launched since such as 'Let's End Fast Tech' and 'The Back Market Promise' have sat inside this positioning and stuck to their distinctive acid yellow, with a black and white treatment reserved for activist work.
How the 'Back Market Promise' travels across markets
'The Back Market Promise' launched first in New York, then across the US, UK, France, Germany and Spain. The campaign has been carefully localised for each market, giving rise to "Toute la vie de Valérie", "El Compromiso de Back Market" and "Das Back Market Versprechen". It appears the team have reshot in multiple language passes which means the films feel made for each market rather than adapted into them. While the campaign was certainly created for the European market, what we don't know is how far the Back Market team intend to take it.
Back Market currently operates in seventeen markets, and some of the fastest-growing are ones these four languages do not cover, including Italy, the Netherlands and Japan. So the open question is whether Back Market plans to adapt 'The Back Market Promise' beyond their core markets. If they do, this concept might limit their options as this creative relies on their real founder. Reshooting in new languages would be expensive but using a voiceover may lose some of the punch of the concept. Or might they consider another production route such as an AI lip sync to carry the performance into languages the cast does not speak? Either way, it's a distinctive and funny European campaign that preserves Back Market's global brand consistency in its key markets.
What keeps a brand consistent across markets
Back Market has reached a good place on global brand consistency, which is harder than it sounds. What we see across the fast scaling global brands we work with is that global brand consistency is an operational problem far more often than a creative one. Many teams lack the structure to protect that consistency as the number of markets, agencies and stakeholders grows, and as people move in and out of the roles that hold them together.
If global brand consistency is on your radar here are four operational considerations we'd recommend starting with.
1. One owner of the whole, with real authority.
Not a coordinator who escalates, but someone who can resolve a conflict between global and local teams and is accountable for the campaign succeeding overall. That can be internal, an agency partner, or a hybrid of the two. What does not work is nobody holding real authority and accountability.
2. Documented decision rights.
Knowing what a market can change (and what it can’t) is key. It gives local teams the freedom to adapt the work without losing the central idea, while preventing local decisions from quietly moving away from the global brand.
3. Cultural input at concept stage, not as a final check.
Whether an idea can be transcreated, whether the casting reads correctly outside its country of origin, whether the mechanic survives a language change: all of that is decided at concepting stage and inherited by everyone downstream. Reviewing too late in the process leaves you out of time and budget to make the changes necessary.
4. A learning loop between campaigns.
Back Market is executing consistently across its many markets, which is something worth celebrating. The consistency is the visible success, but in our experience, what makes it possible is usually the operational work happening behind the scenes, the part you don’t see.
If you are working out how to keep your brand consistent across markets, take a look at how we work or get in touch.
