Three years ago, when Leanne Cutts signed on as group chief marketing officer at HSBC Holdings plc, the most formidable project on her desk was a global rebranding program.
Believing that “great creative takes its lead from culture,” she told a session on Lions Live, a digital-content platform run by Cannes Lions (a sister company of WARC), Cutts immediately realized the breadth of her assignment: London-based HSBC is the seventh-largest bank in the world and one of the largest financial-services providers in Europe.
“HSBC is a very diverse place,” she noted. “We’re in over 60 markets, with 40 million customers...