Innovation Blog

Going Local

We all have clients that have developed a list of desired features and benefits for their new products prior to conducting any market research. Our careful response should be that the voice of the customer is the key driver of features, benefits and value-added differentiators. This is especially true for foreign markets where culture, colors, symbols and values are very different from ours.

As design reaches more corners of the globe, designers and clients need to realign their US-centric mind-set. The world population skews to the young, poor and rural. For example, of the roughly six billion people on the planet, four billion are poor and live on just a few dollars a day. Most live in emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia, India and China. However, while most of the purchasing power in these countries is concentrated in the major cities, most of the people live in rural areas.

One caveat: there is no such thing as going global. There are very few truly global products. Even Coca-Cola utilizes more than 80 formula variations around the world. But all product development needs to be local. In high-potential emerging markets, industrial designers need to adapt and localize the product platform to the needs and wants especially those that are unarticulated and under served of consumers.

Keys to Connecting with Global Consumers

The following roadmap will help designers identify, interpret and apply consumer experiences to the product architecture. These insights are based on conducting first-hand global user research. Secondary research, which is rarely available for emerging markets, is great for preparing a marketing or design brief but is not actionable in terms of actually researching, designing and engineering new products.

Decide where you want to go before you leave home. Remember the old adage “if you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there.” There are more than 250 countries on the planet. The development and marketing team must determine in advance the countries you plan to target. By leveraging the costs involved in developing the product line and the cross-functional team's expertise and efforts across multiple markets, you will maximize revenue and profits.

In the first year, select a small number of countries with the highest potential and accessibility.However, make sure the country is actually emerging. There is a common saying, “Brazil is an emerging market and always will be.”

Begin with easy-to-access countries, where your company is presently doing business. For countries with newly emerging markets, the team needs to understand a number of factors and how they will affect the product launch: infrastructure (transportation, communication), tariffs, duties, stability of currency and the governmental structure.

In the absence of market definition and organization, size, share data, growth rates and other information, the team must develop qualitative indicators that can be quantified later. These factors include use model, buying habits, cultural fit, brand identity and media availability and cost. Use model and buying habits are particularly useful in assessing market potential in the absence of hard information. This is usually qualitative information, and while it is not precise, it may be directional and serve as the foundation for quantitative research.

Don't leave home without it. In this case the “it” is an in-depth understanding of your target markets. Before you dust off that passport and buy your plane ticket, decide if and how you might first conduct user research at home. As a general rule, user research in other countries is five times as expensive and takes twice as long as in the US.

How do you research Japanese, Chinese and Hispanic consumers without going to those countries? Chinese consumers can be found in many countries, such as Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, as well as many North America cities, such as Vancouver, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles and New York. One of my student teams at Kellogg researched soft drinks with Mexican consumers by going to the Chicago suburb of Highwood where respondents had recently arrived from Mexico. Or if you want a quick read on the Polish market, go to Chicago. With an estimated one million Polish residents, it is the world's largest Polish city aside from Warsaw.

We also worked with a large multinational client who was targeting three major regions of the world, with China as the top priority, and were concerned about the appropriateness of our research prompts. Before taking the research abroad, we recruited consumers in our target market segment that had just moved to New York City from China and were able to modify our approach to better suit our audience.

Don't get lost in translation. Many product developers and marketers mistakenly assume that there is homogeneity in foreign markets (e.g., all Chinese are the same and all have similar needs, wants and aspirations). Nothing could be farther from the truth.

For instance, China, like India, Brazil and other large, emerging markets, is a mosaic containing diverse cultures and sub-cultures where approximately 100 different dialects are spoken. It can be divided into three major markets: the approximately 150 to 200 million urban professionals who live in the nine large coastal cities; those in transition, such as the more than 400 million farmers and factory workers who are moving to the 200 largest cities (which each contain more than 1 million people) for higher-paying jobs, better healthcare and an increased standard of living; and the 600 million people who live in hard-to-reach villages and earn less than $5 dollars a day. However, many other sub-markets exist within these major divisions, each with their own complexities and striations.

In overseas markets, the diversity and sheer number of market segments makes the challenge of conducting user research a daunting task. You must understand the cross-cultural factors: thedifferent meanings of color, form, symbols and other artifacts. For example, in most Asian countries designers need to pay special attention to product and packaging color. Ad Age China reported that Cover Girl toned down its blue and white packaging, making it more silvery, as white and blue in some Asian countries symbolizes death or mourning.

Color also affects the use model and product functionality. Chinese women do not want a bronzed, South Beach look, which would give the impression they work outdoors or just arrived from the farm; instead, they prefer a lighter skin tone that conveys they are professionals.

Think poor and rural. When targeting the global consumer, also think rural and poor. For example, India is reported to have more than 600,000 villages, and China is 80 percent rural and mostly poor.

Companies like Colgate and Procter & Gamble target the poor using various approaches. Procter & Gamble ethnographers spend considerable time in the homes of poor people all over the world observing clothes being washed in Russia and feminine pad usage in Mexico. Colgate lowers its price point by packaging its products in smaller quantities and offering small refill packs. It also strives to position itself as the local brand. Colgate means toothpaste in Tagalog (the language on which Filipino is based). In India, Colgate used vans to generate interest in their products and provide oral hygiene education to potential users. In Brazil, Colgate's Xavante project educates Indian tribes about toothpaste.

Find a partner and be a friend first. You must find reliable and trustworthy field-research organizations to conduct ethnographies and group and in-depth interviews, as well as advise you on how to adapt and localize your research specifications to your target market. Your research partner should also provide native-speaking translators and moderators. We have found that English is not English around the world: being able to speak and read English does not mean they understand it. For example, even though we have moderated more than 200 groups in the US, we would not consider running a group session in another country. Even in Singapore, where English is the “first” language, we use in-country moderators.

How do you find a good research company in a country you may have never traveled to? There are several approaches: ask your clients, business colleagues and friends; look online; contact the county's trade offices and consulates in the US; find out who the large multinational companies use;and ask potential suppliers who they work for.

Bon Voyage

The challenge of conducting user research around the world for new product development is enormous but doable if you approach it with an open mind, as a global citizen and with the recognition that the US is not the center of the universe. By planning ahead, partnering with local companies and experts and even arriving a day or two early to immerse yourself in the local culture and talk directly with stores and consumers, you will find your work to be much more rewarding for you and the consumer.