Sir Martin, who as chief executive of WPP has, as much as anyone else, led the global marketing charge, told The Wall Street Journal in an interview today that he thinks "we're losing country focus".
The rush to smaller groups of streamlined global brands epitomised by the likes of Unilever, which is cutting its brand portfolio from 1,500 to 400, could be, he said, backfiring disastrously.
"A client I won't name, a packaged-goods company, has moved strongly to global brands, and a local manager said: '30% of my profits come from a brand that may be jettisoned.' What's happened is that companies are trying to run things in black-and-white ways, where one size fits all. And there's a very simple message: One size doesn't fit all," Sir Martin told the paper.
As well as not taking the one-size-fits-all mantra too far, Sir Martin said that companies should be marketing specific messages to consumer groups, such as Muslims.
"Muslims are 26% of the world's population today; by 2014, they will be 30%. That same year, two-thirds of the world's population will be Asian," he said.
While the Muslim has come into focus through conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, Sir Martin argues that the most important thing about that community is that no one in the West has spent enough time thinking about what makes Muslims unique.
"We assume that if it works in New York it will work in Baghdad, but there are significant differences. There has to be more sensitivity to this issue," he said.
However, while Sir Martin made the case for more localised marketing in the article, he was not writing off global marketing and pointed to brands such as IBM, BP, Shell, Dove shampoo and Vodafone, which had done it successfully.
"They've done advertising with strong creative ideas, which have been well-executed on a global scale... or where necessary, [have taken account] of different executions locally," Sir Martin said.
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