Regional Differences in Global Markets

Just what the world needs - another blog! In mitigation, I haven’t seen anything online which deals with issues dear to the heart of people like us - trying to figure out the best way to promote and sell advanced technical products in rapidly globalizing markets.

Hold on just a minute - I often hear people say - as markets globalize, and companies virtualize, surely it’s getting easier than ever to sell around the world? Well, yes and no. But mostly no. From our perspective, (and each of us have roughly a couple of decades perspective on the question) the mismatch between global marketing strategies and local/regional implementations (i.e. generating revenues) is getting ever greater. Perversely, this seems to be driven by the very trend to globalization which should be making it all so much simpler. Villa on the Aegean Coast of Turkey near Uzumlu

Which brings me to the real subject of this first post - why did we call the blog “2 Hands Clapping” anyway?

In our consultancy work, we have seen many cases where a perfectly good business model & marketing plan falls down when it comes to implementation on a global basis. In our experience, the most important factor leading to poor performance or outright failure is that regional differences have been ignored in terms of how local sales channels and their customers actually operate. So regional sales structures and supporting promotional activities often suffer from a “one size fits all” approach.

Our own approach puts the global strategy hand together with the regional implementation hand - so we make an effective impact rather than a useless gesture.

It may be that our experience in technically specialized markets gives us a false perspective. We’d be interested to get comments from people outside our own industry (primarily silicon, software and systems used in embedded applications) on this subject. However, one of the earliest examples of this “1 Hand Clapping” syndrome I can remember from personal experience (albeit as an outside observer) come from a completely different market.

A long time ago (in a galaxy far far away - well, Belgium actually) I witnessed the opening of the first MacDonalds in Brussels. Shortly after this, a local supermarket chain opened their own version, a virtual clone of the concept. And then rapidly opened a lot more, since - unlike the MacDonalds - they were always full of happy eager diners. They became a runaway success, leaving MacDonalds a long way behind.

The difference was not in the strategy - since they just copied the concept from MacDonalds - but in several small but vital implementation details of local importance. The one which sticks in my mind most clearly was serving a small pot of mayonnaise with the chips (Frites in Belgium, French Fries to our US cousins). Belgians simply will not eat chips if they can’t dunk them in sauce. Mayo is the most popular. MacDonalds caught on eventually, but by then their competitor dominated the national market.

We’ll be developing this theme of adaptation of marketing strategy to local conditions in future postings - possibly using more recent examples from markets we have more direct experience of.

This entry was posted on 02/01/2007 at 05:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorised. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.