With congested ‘western’ markets offering fewer and fewer opportunities for growth, multi-national brands have long been looking towards ‘developing markets’ to achieve their global business plans.

When it comes to working in developing markets, there is no need to compromise 

As these markets are explored, and brands positioned and extended, there is a growing need for more engagement with consumers during this developmental work. However, the shame is that during this engagement, there seems to be hesitancy in doing it in the way we all know it should be done. There are too many compromises.

Techniques, teamwork and ultimately consumer interactions are all potentially compromised when it comes to having work done in developing markets. Whilst ‘over here’ there’s ever greater confidence in using a variety of powerful and bespoke consumer-driven approaches, there seems to be a doubt as to how these will work ‘over there’.  Many resort to ‘probably best to just leave it to the locals, those with the regional expertise’.  However, ideally we should be collaborating with the ‘locals’ and getting to know their consumer as we already know ’ours’.

Beyond simply delegating too much, we have also noticed a potentially dangerous shortcut being made when doing work in developing markets.  Many projects are scoped across several countries in the ‘developing’ region.  From a client perspective it is important to research all these countries as they are each considered key markets. That is clear.  What is not clear however is that very often in designing methodologies, interacting with consumers and most critically building the conclusions, all of these key markets are treated as one as if no cultural differences matter.  In our experience, it is actually remarkable to see the differences between a businessman from Seoul and Beijing or even within one country – the differences across different ‘mother’ types.

Better approaches avoid the above pitfalls and go on to integrate the consumer work with real-time team analysis and development – much as we would do back in Europe and the US.

Our own New Solutions work has recently involved collaboration across regions and global teams to make the learning more actionable for all involved.  Of course, it takes experience of these markets to make these adaptations work, but with the stakes so high as global brands fight for advantage in these key growth areas, it’s experience that pays off strongly.

Strategic innovation and positioning in all markets and especially in developing markets tends to deal with more open and complex opportunities. These are typically best tackled through iterative approaches that efficiently recycle learnings and save on whole new project phases.

By contrast, the compromise approach of just developing some concepts ‘over here’ and then farming them out for a few Focus Groups ‘over there’ tends to be sterile. We believe it is critical to the eventual success of the project to get inspiration to generate real, consumer-driven ideas despite the language and cultural barriers that sometimes restrict individual interactions. Nonetheless, harnessing creativity is too important to be compromised and with experience, barriers can be overcome.

In unfamiliar territory, it is even more important to engage closely with consumers. 

An example of it working…

In a recent project in China and the Philippines, we were working with the client team on uncovering the new positioning opportunities that could be developed based on new technology within an existing consumer market. Using our experience of these markets to ensure we were sensitive to local attitudes and capabilities we were able to develop a programme that was every bit as effective as ‘over here’. The key elements were as follows:
• The active involvement of the client’s global brand team ensured that the growing understanding of the ‘local’ consumers was retained in their hearts and minds, in ways that reading a research report can never replicate.
• Before the research, the consumers were tasked to prepare their own creative ‘scrapbooks’, which we had designed to explore the areas of their lives and needs that we were most interested in
• Everyone in the project team went and met consumers in their homes and, with some linguistic assistance, were able to talk to them about the context of their lives and how the category we were interested in played a role for them and their families
• We ran groups where consumers explored a wide range of different ‘concept components’ and helped guide us towards the best benefit areas. This was in contrast to the more simplistic approach of asking them just to evaluate a small set of fully fledged ‘concepts’, with the inevitable risk that the best ideas had already been weeded out, or were not represented. In this instance, this more open approach proved vital as the key opportunity emerged from this more open discussion.
• Together with the client team, we shaped and evolved the elements of the concepts as we learned more from group to group. This allowed us to include and play with new ideas and hypotheses as we progressed.

The outcome was clear definition of a unique opportunity in these new markets that not only created clear competitive advantage for our client’s brand but also gave the basis for successful entry into a new set of markets in other developing regions.

Conclusion
Developing Markets probably represent your global brand’s greatest opportunity for growth. In these instances, it is more important than ever that their ‘unfamiliarity’ doesn’t lead to using simplistic and less effective consumer approaches. New Solutions has the experience to help bring project teams close to the real lives and priorities of ‘local’ consumers and develop unique and powerful growth opportunities on the back of that understanding.