Ensuring Your Brand is Culturally Relevant with Joanna Hutchins of Royal Greenland

Sep 9

Joanna Hutchins is EVP, Marketing, Innovation & Sustainability at Royal Greenland, the world's largest wild caught seafood company.

In this episode of Let's Talk Limbic Sparks, Joanna reveals how to ensure that your brand is culturally relevant. We talk about her decades of experience leading global and local brands in Asia and other parts of the world, and how she helped fuel their success with deep understanding of local customers.

Joanna shares lessoned learned from conducting customer insights research before launching the Dove brand in China that revealed the need for cultural adaptations to ensure both product and marketing relevance. She talks about the imperatives to create emotional connections with customers, and the perils of focusing too much on performance marketing. She shares details about her book, Chinafy, that includes 10 repeatable models for innovation that business leaders all over the world can learn from the Chinese market.

Key Takeaways and Soundbites:

“The common thread for me is human psychology. How people make choices. How we can influence behavior.”

“No matter where I worked, in what countries, on what brands - it's about getting to those universal human truths, which aren't wildly different around the world, although there might be cultural contexts that might shape them slightly differently.”

“I do feel like there's a direct correlation between the growth of performance marketing and to some degree the decline of emotional resonance marketing. Brands that get both of those right are the ones that absolutely soar.”

“People make thousands of brand choices a day whether they realize it or not, and you want to be one of those that are instantly, almost unconsciously made.”

“You really really need to deeply understand your consumer, and that doesn't happen by reading reports or staring at spreadsheets. You need to be close to people's lives, go where they are, understand how they live their lives, what's important. Maybe you need to shop with them, understand how they make choices.”

“As marketing becomes more and more about data, there's no substitute for actually getting close to human beings and understanding how they think, behave, and what matters to them.”

“There's no amount of media spend that can compensate for a poor execution that doesn't emotionally connect.”

Here are some fun facts about Joanna…

Joanna Hutchins is the EVP of Marketing, Innovation and Sustainability at Royal Greenland, based in Nuuk, Greenland. Originally from the US, her expertise is forged from both classic, best practice multinational consumer brand management at companies like Unilever combined with an entrepreneurial drive and flair from her SME / startup experience, where she has gathered 30+ years of experience in global and local businesses across the US, Latin America, Europe, and Asia in some of the fastest-growing and most competitive markets and categories in the world.

Joanna specializes in global brand turn-around, scaling brands and businesses with breakthrough innovation platforms, game-changing GTM strategies, and highly effective, award-winning brand communications. Her accolades are diverse - across leadership, business and creativity - and include IPWS, Women Leadership Awards, Business Leader of the Year 2020. One of “1000 Global Marketing Leaders” by Internationalist Magazine and the ANA. 2x AMA Effies awarded. 2x Cannes Lions awarded. DBA Grand Prix awarded.

Also an author, Joanna has written about insights on innovation and disruptive growth in China, "Chinafy: Why China is leading the world in innovation and how the rest of the world can catch up," launched in the US, UK and SEA in April 2023 by Marshall Cavendish publishers. In 2024, she authored “Social Commerce and Martech: Riding the Convergence of Social, Technology, and the Marketplace.” Both are available in hard copy where books are sold or online on major sites like Amazon or Barnes & Noble.