The 24-hour economy has an impact on daily life in Japan. Convenience stores that are open late in the evening are now starting to boom.
Universal Products
The Dutch universalistic orientation is expressed in their preference for universal products: a limited variety, available in large quantities, with a reasonable quality and a low price. The success of Hema department stores, clothing retail company C&A, the Dutch-based wholesaling company Makro, and the company brands of food retailer Albert Heijn can be attributed to this preference. The Swedish furniture retail company IKEA has been extremely successful in the Netherlands by using a strategy that appeals to this preference for the universal product.
This preference might seem to be in contradiction with Dutch individualism. Although the Dutch want to express their individualism in their buying habits, they don't do this by buying specialty products or famous brand names. They try to express their individualism by looking for what they consider to be creative variations and combinations of universal products.
Marketing for Particular Needs
Singaporeans are very particularistic about festive days. A festive day of any ethnic group is welcomed as a reason to celebrate and offer sales specials. Where, other than in Singapore, would you find a shop with a sign saying "Jesus is the reason for the season" to make people aware of the Christmas sales? Just before the Hindu Diwali festival, advertisements in the newspaper for cars, computers, and just about anything are labeled as "Diwali specials."
Singapore has always been a very diverse society in which the need for marketing to different ethnic groups has been taken for granted. Since the beginning of the last century, Chinese Singaporeans have distinguished between "Chinatown business," "ah so business" (Chinese business outside of Chinatown), and "ang moh companies" (western business). Because of rapid economic developments, different age groups in Singapore have very different consumer patterns as well, and it is extremely important to differentiate marketing for the different age groups.
Singaporean companies have a tradition of adapting to different market needs in a flexible way. A major Singaporean bank has this as its slogan for home loans: "The one thing we're very rigid about is flexibility."
Beauty Products Adapted to Local Circumstances
Marketing of products adapted to local circumstances can be very successful in Singapore. The founder of the Singaporean firm Coslab, selling therapeutic beauty products, found that he could not compete with the multinational American and European pharmaceutical companies who had dominated the global market for a long time. Instead he concentrated on developing products that cured tropical skin problems because there weren't many such products at the time. Since the type of rashes that occur in humid countries are markedly different from those in temperate climates, he was able to develop special products that were more effective in treating "tropical" acne, for example. He also developed new products to treat other skin problems particular to the tropics such as sensitive skin, pigmentation, dehydration, and uneven skin. He started a franchise for beauty salons using the products. There are now 200 outlets in Singapore and Malaysia selling his products.
Failure of Giant's Particularistic Logo Policy
When Taiwanese bicycle manufacturer Giant started to globalize, it did not see the need for one universal logo in all its locations. Giant felt that there should be different logos for different locations so that every location would have a logo that would fit the local environment and reflect local creativity. However this particularistic policy did not work out well. Giant could not get equal effort and quality from all locations in the design of the logo and in the end they chose to go with a single standardized logo.
Mass Manufacturing and Mass Market
For most of the twentieth century, America was the world's largest consumer market. Starting in the 1920s, the trend was to mass-market whatever machines could produce. America came to specialize in long manufacturing runs of simple products, cheaply produced, and widely advertised and distributed. It was the triumph of the universal product.
Nowadays customers are more demanding, and today markets are much more customer and niche oriented. As the advertising industry has expanded and evolved, it has also had an impact on the demand for more and more sophisticated and specialized products.
The Global-Local Dichotomy
As we can observe in the above examples, the dominant dilemma in this dimension is the global-local dichotomy. This can be framed as: "Shall we have one standardized approach (identical product range and associated identical marketing support) or shall we go for a local approach (different products and local based marketing in each destination)? Are our customers best served by our becoming global and alike, or will they be more influenced by their particular national or local cultures?" (see Figure 2.1).
The dilemma is reconciled through transnational specialization: We continuously integrate best practice and satisfy customer needs by learning from the diversity of adopting, adapting, and combining the best.
Taiwan has suffered for some time from a reputation for low-end products and inconsistent quality. "Made in Taiwan" used to have the image of low price, low quality. The reputation for cloning led to an image of "me too" manufacturers, known for imitating designs and compromising quality to keep prices competitive. Acer Computers was one of the first Taiwanese manufacturers that managed to change the image of Made in Taiwan for the better. For some time, Acer was forced to use creative ways to avoid putting "Made in Taiwan" on its products because of the bad image. Then it started with its "global brand, local touch" strategy; it wanted to develop Acer as a global brand name that would also be associated with local assembly, local shareholders, local management, local identity, and local autonomy in marketing and distribution. "Me Too is Not My Style" was used as the title of a book by Acer's CEO. "Global brand, local touch" is a good example of the reconciliation of particularism and universalism in business strategy.
Figure 2.2: The global-local dilemma
In the years of expansion Lego, the Danish toy company, wanted to improve their instruction booklets for the American market so that this would help increase sales. They wanted to be as successful as they were in Germany, which they took as their role model. Lego's research group had videotaped German kids playing with Lego. The children would carefully cut the sticker of the new box out, after which they started sorting the different elements and organizing them according to the colors in which they came. With the same extreme care they then took the instruction booklet and read it from cover to cover. Subsequently they built precise replicas of the models shown in the booklet. When the observers filmed American kids, the results were completely different. The majority of the American children took the box of building blocks and immediately started to tear it apart in great excitement. The pieces dropped on the floor, creating a mess from the start. Then they started to experiment without looking at the instructions; they didn't seem to care about them. Action was what they wanted, making their own things and following their own ideas, and their mothers praised them for their creativity and unique constructions. The German kids, on the contrary, were praised for following instructions. American children have some practical direction so they could learn by doing and by making errors, and seem to love a box of Lego because they see it as having infinite possibilities. In Germany, Lego is a means of learning how to follow instructions and perform tasks in a prescribed manner. The difference here is creativity by making unique combinations versus following universal instructions to reproduce pictures in the booklet.