Who's in charge here .?

Another boring blast from the past , or a call for pragmatism ?
During the early part of my career local brand managers were exhorted by their bosses to behave like business unit General Managers , and take overall ownership of every aspect of their brands, from sales forecasting and other supply chain disciplines through the four P's including advertising and promotion. Honesty requires me to say that particularly for multicountry brands this was the cause in some companies of brands with little or no consistency in brand identity, sometimes justified by different local consumer needs, often not.. In this era some companies practised a comparatively light touch approach to ensuring consistency of brand identity, with local teams still enjoying a good measure of input in all aspects of the marketing mix, albeit with some centralised coordination and oversight.

Critically a notion of the primacy of the local market still had meaning...

At some point in the 90's I think it became the custom to begin the increasing fragmentation of the job , with brand equity considerations and control transferred definitively from local teams to global or regional marketing teams.

At this point the local brand marketing teams were left essentially with local so called brand activation roles , eg picking from a menu of centrally prepared options for promotion, new products, and comms. The obvious benefits of a more centralised approach included subtantial cost synergies , as well as providing for greater consistency of international brand strategy and brand identity...

The consequences however unintended at the sharp end in the local market are the risk that the brand becomes further removed from the local consumer,lowest common denominator blandness, that success is more dependant on skilful internal relationship management between local and central teams;and finally for me personally the bigggest bugbear , that the appeal ,reward and role of local brand management is somehow diminished , with the reduced autonomy that comes if the local team no longer has full use of the marketing toolbox ......

Today I see the brand management role being fragmented further and further ,as new specialisations make their presence felt and new departments spring to life: Digital and Innovation being the most talked about...and don't start me on automation either please....

So my question is who's in charge nowadays, and does any one person actually have a holistic view of the brand in the local market?

p.s :My speciality subject is food , where local tastes and habits vary widely and do matter; there may be less of a local issue in other fmcg product categories of course...