Want to guess what the biggest brand in the world is by value or sales? What’s the biggest brand in the world by volume?

In all probability you thought of something like Apple, Coca Cola, Pampers or Nike. There’s no doubting that these brands have excellent sales globally and are very strong brands, but none of them tops the list of value and volume.

That particular honor goes to ‘Great Value’, a brand of which I am guessing most of you reading this have never heard.

Sometimes I worry that my blogs turn out to be too prescient. Within days of proposing a manifesto for the global marketer to stay in business, the biggest global FMCG player announced a major job losses and a restructuring in ad spend.

That’s 4,300 people, the majority of whom have global experience coming onto the employment market in one way or another.

Last week I started a major new project in a country I had never been to and in a business sector where I have (I will openly admit) almost no experience.

Yet I came away from the week realizing that business issues are described in the same way wherever you go – and the excuses for failing to deliver are consistent and consistently untrue.

I’ve written before about the challenges of being a global marketer. I painted a scenario of the life of the global marketer.

The experiences I shared in that post were deeply personal – this recorded with total accuracy my working experience at the highest level of global marketing (albeit that I was inspired by a book I had read in the structuring the scenario).