Localizing global brand portfolio for new market

Carlsberg Group had the positioning and the communication strategy. What it did not have was a version of either that worked in Uzbekistan.

The portfolio made that harder rather than easier. Tuborg, Kronenbourg, 1664 Blanc, Weihenstephan and Žatecký Gus each arrive with global guidelines and a settled international character. Sarbast, the local brand, answers to none of that and speaks to an audience the others were never built for. Running them through one shared content template would have flattened the differences that make each of them worth buying.

What we did

I led the team across the whole portfolio, and each brand got its own social strategy and its own content line — global positioning translated into local terms rather than reproduced in them. That meant deciding, brand by brand, which parts of the international character had to survive the translation and which parts were simply not going to land in this market.

The result

Posts reached over three million people, engagement ran at 21%, and the combined audience across the portfolio grew by more than 157% over the course of the work.