By M. Isi Eromosele

Many years ago, globalization was the new paradigm in international business. However, from a branding perspective, it has lost its initial efficiency giving the fact that consumers do not seem to feel a connection anymore with the standardized products of global corporations, as catered to them in mass marketing communication programs.

With their centralized decision making processes, most companies simply stopped having a connection with their customers in the new global marketplace and neglected its emergence.

As such, the influence of local market characteristics arose, and with that a new term that encapsulates the global and the local – glocal. “Glocalization” encourages companies to “think global, act local”, and they could do so by using the global brand, while localizing certain elements of that brand in order to suit a particular marketplace or country. 

Globalization of Markets

For many years, large scale companies stopped emphasizing on the customization of their offers and opted to providing globally standardized products that were advanced, functional, reliable and low priced.

They argued that informed customers were heading toward a “convergence of tastes”; thus corporations should exploit the “economics of simplicity”. As such, they maintained that the future belonged to global corporations that did not cater to local differences in taste but, instead, adopted strategies that operated as if the entire world (or major regions of it) were a single entity, which required these organizations to sell the same things in the same way everywhere in the world.

Transnational companies standardized products, packaging and communication to achieve a least-common-denominator positioning that would be effective across cultures.  For a while, selling standardized products and services was a good strategy. However, the global marketplace went through an evolution and customers stopped feeling a connection with the generic products and communications.

Even  the products that were synonyms with ‘globalization’ took a different approach. For instance, Coca-Cola, the firm often portrayed as the exemplar of the standardized product, found that it’s increasingly standardized strategy had run its course.

The world was demanding greater flexibility, responsiveness and local sensitivity, even while the corporations were further consolidating decision making and standardizing their marketing practices.

The next big evolutionary step of ‘going global’ now has to be ‘going local’.

Global, Local and Glocal Strategies

Nowadays, global corporations face difficult decisions regarding what marketing strategy to adopt. Global marketing strategies aim to maximize standardization, homogenization and integration of marketing activities across markets throughout the world.

However, global marketers must address a number of issues in their marketing strategy to ensure their brand will be successful worldwide. Examples of such issues include differences in the economic, political, social and cultural environment around the world. 

While the theory of standardization of marketing activities works on a strategic level, it is often not suitable for the richness of detail needed on operative and tactical levels. Most marketing activities will be more successful when adapted to local conditions and circumstances in the global marketplace.

In this way, a pure global marketing strategy is not ideal as it does not take locally related issues into account. Marketers need to understand how their brand is meeting the needs of customers and how successful their marketing efforts are in individual countries.

Multinational marketers face challenges of creating marketing and advertising programs capable of communicating effectively with a diversity of target markets. To assist in this imposing task, various frameworks must be developed to determine the degree to which marketing and advertising efforts should be either globalized or localized, mixed or combined.

There are five marketing strategies available to a firm contemplating doing business on a global basis. A firm might decide to either standardize or localize its products, either standardize or localize its communications programs, or combine the two.

The five possibilities that this decision framework considers range from a company incorporating a ‘global strategy’ (standardizing both product and communication program) to developing a completely ‘local strategy’ (customizing both the product and  communication program) for each unique market. In the middle are the two mixed strategies and the last strategies are combines. These three strategies could be developed into ‘glocal strategies’.

Glocal Strategy

Glocal strategy refers to the idea of “think global, act local”, and it represents a middle way between the global and the local strategies. 

Successful corporations must develop a glocal strategy, by utilizing their global experiences and then customizing and tailoring their services and products in such a way that would appeal to local markets. This should not apply just for product design or communications; it has to incorporate branding and all of the seven variables from the marketing mix, whenever possible.

A glocal strategy standardizes certain core elements and localizes other elements. It is a compromise between global and domestic marketing strategies.

Glocal marketing reflects both the ideal of pure global marketing strategy and the recognition that locally related issues of marketing activities need to be considered. In other words, the concept prescribes that in order to be successful globally, marketing managers must act locally in the different markets  they choose to enter. In a global strategy, the corporate level gives strategic direction while local units focus on the local

customer differences.

Glocalization is the tempering effects of local conditions on global pressures” and it means the co-presence of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies. As such, glocalization, then, is the art of attaining a fine balance of assimilating foreign influences into a society that add to its diversity without overwhelming it.

The following are the attributes of glocalization:

strategically

The practice of glocalization can produce the following competitive advantages for companies that put it into effect:

In recent years, as sales plunged, global - brand corporations started to pay more attention and listen to their local business partners about how to adapt product attributes and advertising messages to local tastes.

Glocal marketing or brand managers have the task of balancing demands from headquarters with those of local branches and taking full advantage of local expertise, knowledge and information. So, some transnational companies began delegating more authority over product development and marketing to local managers.

Meanwhile, U.S. multinationals like Philip Morris and Coca-Cola ramped up their acquisition of local brands, for the same reasons that investors diversify a stock portfolio.

Today, two-thirds of Coca-Cola’s sales in Japan are from local beverage brands, and the company now owns more than 100 local beverage brands worldwide. In some cases, the global-brand owners are financing totally separate companies. Unilever India, for example, has set up the freestanding Wheel organization as a low-cost enterprise that markets quality, low-priced local brands to the mass market.

Glocal marketing allows for local and global marketing activities to be optimized simultaneously. Nowadays, global companies must understand that they often need to customize their products or services to a certain extent in specific global markets.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

Copyright Control © 2013 Oseme Group

By M. Isi Eromosele

Business Design is a methods-based approach to innovation that helps teams get to bigger breakthroughs faster and define strategies for competitive advantage.

In working with executives from around the world, my colleagues and I at Oseme Creative have seen some clear patterns emerge regarding the particular attributes required to excel in this emerging discipline.

What we have found is that is that it takes a combination of the right mindset (being) and a rigorous methodology (doing) that unlocks a person’s thinking, and that one must consider all three of these factors to fully realize the potential of Business Design as a platform for enterprise success.

Being: Design as a Mindset

A design mind is characterized by a collection of mindsets that determine and define one’s emotional agility. These can come from the ‘self ’, and can also be shaped by the enterprise environment or workplace culture. Importantly, it is one’s personal choice to cultivate self-awareness and decide how to harness, manage or develop these dimensions in working with others.

Attributes Inherent In A Design Mindset

Openness

This entails being open to new ideas, new people and new ways of doing things. Elements of openness include an active imagination, sensitivity, attentiveness to inner feelings, preference for variety, intellectual curiosity and an ability to suspend judgment.

People who are very open are willing to consider novel ideas and unconventional values. Without an open mind, one cannot fully realize the potential of the design approach to innovation.

Empathy

Human-centric design stems from a genuine sense of caring about people and being able to understand and appreciate their feelings, thoughts and needs. In designing something, we create value with and for other people.

Whether understanding vital stakeholders or valuing team members emotions and perspectives, the ability to listen emphatically and incorporate diverse perspectives into the design process lies at the heart of effective design.

Intrinsic Motivation

While extrinsic motivation such as raises, promotions and recognition is a natural part of the human psyche, intrinsic motivation has been identified as an important fuel for creativity.

Individuals motivated intrinsically by purpose or passion have a genuine interest, excitement and engagement in their work. Whether it be the challenge of a difficult problem or the pursuit of a purposeful ambition, these individuals become very involved in the development process of design.

This is often evidenced in organizations like hospitals and schools, but is equally intrinsic in for-profit enterprises of all types that have a clear mission to create true value (economic and human) for stakeholders.

Mindfulness

Consciousness of one’s thoughts, feelings and surroundings is critical to both maximizing inspiration and adaptability. In the design process, everything is relevant and can be a source of inspiration.

Greater mindfulness of both the self and the world around you will serve to create an expanded repertoire of reference points and stimulation in solving complex problems. Mindfulness also positions you to capitalize on serendipity, an integral part of seizing design opportunities.

Adjustment

Adjustment captures the general tendency to be emotionally stable, calm, even-tempered and functional in the face of ups and downs. Given the nature of the design process (collaborating with others, participating in a‘mash up’ of ideas and soliciting feedback as part of the development process), those who have a high adjustment profile are able to face challenging situations without becoming upset.

This also manifests itself in comfort with ambiguity, enabling people to find joy in the journey of tackling difficult problems.

Optimism

Just as adjustment can be critical in dealing with the present, optimism can help drive people forward toward creative and productive resolutions. Optimism also fuels resiliency and perseverance.

The design process is a dynamic one, filled with many twists and turns in the quest to iterate through to a breakthrough solution. A hopeful view of the future will fortify one’s ability to see a project through to successful completion.

Doing: Implementation Methods

Business Design combines thinking and doing through a rigourous methodology and thrives on tactical agility. Methods, frameworks and tools are learnable, skill-based exercises that help to shape behavior, shift mindsets, enhance thinking capacities, and ultimately boost both individual and team performance.

There is no pre-set process or ‘formula’ for doing, but rather a repertoire of tools that help to harness the wisdom and ingenuity of teams. Most of the ‘ways of doing’ that can be used throughout the design process, including the design of business strategies and models, fall into one of the following implementation methods:

Multi-Disciplinary Collaboration

Designers find value and inspiration in diverse perspectives and skills. Not only does this enable them to harness the wisdom of the team across functions and disciplines, it will accelerate progress by tapping into the team’s intuition and creative energy and establish a broad base of ownership that will give the outcomes traction.

Important mindsets for collaboration include openness, empathy and adjustment. Intrinsic motivation and optimism will also help you get past the rough patches in the collaborative process.

Understanding and Need-Finding

This is all about seeking to understand people’s motivations on a deeper level, both inside and outside the enterprise, leading to the discovery of unmet needs and new opportunities to create greater value.

There are many examples where companies have leveraged user insights not considered by the competition. For example, Nike’s deep understanding of the runners’ need to push their personal athletic performance to a higher level has driven an ongoing stream of innovation in products, services, events and community development.

To get to this kind of understanding, one must draw from many of the mindsets noted earlier, including empathy, openness, mindfulness and intrinsic motivation.

Iterative Prototyping and Experimentation

Prototyping entails building out ideas in order to make the abstract and the conceptual concrete, as a tool for thinking, communicating and advancing development. This is valuable in the broadest sense: creating physical prototypes or experiences during the development process enables a team to explore multiple strategies and business models to deliver value.

Even ‘in-market prototyping’ serves as an important experiment to test out new ideas, leading to important learning and quick wins.

All of the dimensions of a design mindset are critical here, with the most essential being empathy, intrinsic motivation, adjustment (for when your great ideas get trashed by consumers) and optimism, especially when you have a breakthrough concept but are challenged in making it viable from a business standpoint.

Thinking: Building a Wholesome Mental Capacity

The value of Business Design methodologies lies in their ability to stimulate breakthrough thinking in a structured and productive manner, thereby fostering intellectual agility.

Through the practice of these methodologies, all forms of intelligence can be more fully developed and make the brain more ‘whole’ on an individual level and more synergistic on a team or enterprise level. Following are six thinking skills that serve as important boosters in the value creation process.

Emotional Intelligence

Building on the empathy mindset, this entails more than just an attitude toward others and appreciation for their thoughts and feelings; it’s about knowing how to fully leverage the power of emotions throughout the entire design process.

It is a thinking skill focused on identifying, assessing and controlling the emotions of one’s self, of others and of groups. A masterful Business Designer applies emotional intelligence to every step of development and execution, to one’s self (in terms of awareness and management of one’s own emotions), the team (in understanding and managing the dynamics of productive teams), and the market place at large (in terms of ‘social intelligence’ – the awareness of and consideration of contextual human dynamics).

Systems Thinking

In Business Design, it is important to recognize virtually everything as part of a broader ‘ecosystem’of human systems, solution systems and business systems.

Enhanced through the process of mapping, a competent Business Designer has the capacity to think holistically and integratively and understand how people, solutions components and activities relate to and influence one another within a broader context.

Visualization

This form of thinking involves envisioning and communicating at every step of the design process. This includes the ability to see the end result as a concrete and complete picture: to see the complete solution played out in its most robust form, to see the way the business will work with all of the necessary partners and enterprise systems and even to see success in the market and the potential paradigm shift that a breakthrough can trigger.

The methodologies described in the doing section help stimulate this type of thinking through persona development, rapid prototyping, business model design and storytelling.

All of these bring ideas to life and lead to a more natural inclination to envision new possibilities. This kind of ‘destination thinking’ can also help bring teams into alignment.

Abductive Reasoning

Tapping into one’s imagination and believing that the seemingly impossible is actually quite possible requires a form of logic called ‘abductive reasoning’.

New-to-the-world ideas are difficult, if not impossible, to prove. The ability to believe in possibilities requires a combination of thinking skills, one of which is the ability to process many points of reference and make an intelligent ‘leap of logic’in making the case that there’s a great chance that an original idea could prove to be successful.

There are a number of examples in game-changing successes in which the organization

didn’t constrain itself to existing solution sets or models, but instead pursued what could be.

FedEx, eBay, Google, Southwest, Tata and Grameen Bank are all examples of new-to-the-world ideas that made a breakthrough impact on culture and enterprise value creation.

Synthesis

Throughout the design process, taking many disparate bits and pieces and transforming them into a new thought or solution is critical to new value creation. This is an essential notion in Business Design – the identification of an unmet (and often unarticulated) need.

It is also essential in creating new solutions which may draw upon a number of existing elements reconfigured in a new way or the design of new strategic models inspired by many different existing models in the pursuit to create an entirely new configuration.

Intuition

This entails more than just using gut feel to guide development. Rather, it is a very important and developable thinking skill that involves gathering, articulating and evaluating one’s own intuition and that of others.

By recognizing the value of intuition, being able to effectively deconstruct it and extract valuable data, one can capitalize on the wealth of wisdom within a team. Leveraging intuition also requires elements of the design mindset, most notably openness, empathy and mindfulness.

Closing

The practice of Business Design entails much more than design thinking. Different types of thinking are activated throughout the process on both an individual and a group basis.

Business Design calls for bilateral thinking and adaptive doing, enabling a constant toggling between a variety of ways of thinking and doing. Such agility is essential for innovation and becomes even more powerful if you are able to rewire your brain to be bilateral throughout the process.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

Copyright Control © 2013 Oseme Group