Back Market's new focus on global brand consistency

In 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 is a new and funny creative beat in an approach Back Market has now stuck to for well over a year, a change from the period preceding. So what has changed in how Back Market markets itself, and what actually keeps a fast-scaling brand consistent across global markets?

What changed in Back Market's marketing?

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 all 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

Made by the Back Market in-house Studio team and Mother London, 'The Back Market Promise' launched in New York first, then across the US, UK, France, Germany and Spain. The campaign has been carefully adapted in each language, giving rise to "Toute la vie de Valérie", "El Compromiso de Back Market" and "Das Back Market Versprechen". The localisation approach is the interesting part. It appears the team have reshot in multiple language passes which means the films feel made for each market rather than adapted into them. And while the campaign was certainly created for the European market, what we don't know is how far they intend to take it.

Back Market operates in more than 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 this was built as a European and English-language campaign, or whether more language versions exist that have not surfaced yet. If they do want to go further, the options are interesting. Another shoot block, a different asset for the remaining markets, or a production route such as AI lip sync to carry the performance into languages the cast does not speak.

What keeps a brand consistent across markets

Back Market have got their global brand consistency to a good place and it's holding, 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. What most teams lack is 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 it together.

If you are trying to improve your global brand consistency, 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 it.
2. Documented decision rights. What a market can change, and what it cannot. This is what lets local teams adapt work properly without the central idea drifting, and it is what stops a local decision quietly contradicting the global brand.
3. Cultural and localisation 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 often means you are out of time or out of budget to make the changes necessary.
4. A learning loop between campaigns. A structured review, feeding into the briefing template, the translation memory and the next planning cycle. This is the piece that turns a run of campaigns into a platform rather than a sequence of restarts.

Back Market is executing consistently across this many markets, and it looks to be working for them. The consistency is the visible success but in our experience, the reason it holds is almost always the operational success behind the scenes that you can'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.