May 27, 2007
Challenges of going global
Know your customers
Leadership in market is almost impossible without establishing a strong presence everywhere. Competing at the same horizontal playing field means that the global companies face many challenges to market the product or services, keep customers satisfied and make sales. Addressing these challenges and proliferation of its products and services in emerging or developing markets and keeping up its brand loyalty in established markets may be completely different. Where ever you want to make your presence and make your brand visible, all the marketing efforts are ultimately about changing the customer behavior. Attract customers attention towards you - which means connect them with your brand, product, service, where they make purchase decisions. Binding customers with your brand is not so easy. You must understand their needs, purchasing behavior, attitudes, beliefs, cultural aspects of using specific products and services, it’s relevancy and lifestyles of customers to win a space in their minds. For some, design, style, and level of fashion may be the key drivers in the products buy or service they take; for many others, it’s about functionalities, technology and compatibility with other things. If you want to win and increase your market share, then you need to expand the spectrum of your products and service portfolio that covers requirement of different clusters of customer requirements. You should target to your real buyers. Never create confusion in market, maintaining customer loyalty and retain customer satisfaction is much more important. Don’t just think about short term relationships.
Unleash the power of Internet and Web 2.0
We have noticed tremendous changes in the media environment. You can not push the products or services or the one way messages to people/customers. You have to initiate collaborative and interactive conversations. Customers value only the caring and meaningful relationships. The Internet is playing very important role in building such relationship than anyone ever imagined. Brands are made and destroyed on the Internet, and there’s a completely different set of new marketing rules for dealing the new breed of customers. But trust and respect is same for the Internet or the brick and mortar businesses. Customers on the Internet are open to any ideas and they want to create contents collaboratively with you. The web 2.0 revolution in Internet has changed the way businesses build relationship with their customers, they are in charge.
Traditional marketers have to get used to people shaping the brand through Internet marketing. Industries are still pushing their self generated product or service contents and they have not been still able to figure out how to unleash all the beneficial and creative potential that lies in binding with people in exciting new ways. I don’t think traditional way of flashing banner ads are a total waste of money, but they are not as effective as the new ways of emerging marketing channels. Context-sensitive marketing makes a lot of sense. Just recently, companies have finding possibilities such channels and started investing a lot in trying to understand how brands can interact with sites like Google, YouTube and MySpace and blogs.
Customers demand quality
Creating products and offering services for markets where cost is very important needs specific design, material, engineering, and production intelligence. You can build a product $1000, but it requires really a careful thought to sell the same product with the same reliability, quality and promise of trust for $100 or $200. People demand the same level of quality experience, support and service for whatever the price they paid for the product. For that building the whole customer support infrastructure in emerging and new markets is also extremely important. Buying a cell phone for many people in these markets is the same level of investment as someone in a developed market buying a car. It’s really big investment, and value of money is incomparably different. So the care they receive after they buy any product is a crucial part of the brand experience.
Go close to the People
The other major challenges is getting distribution into very remote areas.
Business may get success only if they move into the new geography and business domain by helping people feel close to the things that are important in their lives.
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