How did you learn how to create demand for the offerings your company provides? Most people either go to school or learn on the job. Sometimes, they do a little of each . . . as I did.
When I was studying at Harvard Business School, two methods were used to teach marketing: cases involving specific decisions facing real marketing managers; and unpaid consulting assignments working for companies with unresolved marketing issues. In either course style the issues studied always related to U.S. businesses and their American customers.
I found this academic work to be riveting. Subsequently, I was delighted to work as a professional consultant for issues concerning some of the same consumer brands that I had studied while in a marketing class. When I did, I was surprised to find that the business school cases I had read contained just a small part of the information that these clients had on hand.
By combining the clients' proprietary information with syndicated market data, I was able to develop new methods to spot problems and opportunities that were invisible from the perspective of the case studies. As a result of having more and better data, I was fortunate to devise some unexpected, but highly effective, marketing strategies.
However, give the credit for those strategies to whoever was smart enough to gather and keep all those data.
Later, I worked on similar consumer brands but the issues concerned customers in third-world countries. In these instances, I had almost no data to work with and whatever data I had appeared to be mostly false. I felt like I was walking through quicksand in a bad dream. In these situations, all kinds of unexpected things happened, and almost always for the worse.
Today, I'm often called upon to play a different role, as a professor helping talented marketers who want to accomplish the kind of positive results that I have often helped my consulting clients achieve for the U.S. sales of their brands.
Although some time has passed since I studied at Harvard, I find that there still isn't much helpful customer and marketing information available for consumer brands operating in lesser developed countries.
As my international students struggle to find whatever opportunities there are, I often wish they could see the kind of data that my American clients routinely share with me about the U.S. market. Every so often, I'm delighted to find a student who understands the enormous cost of missing information and wants to do something to fill in the gaps.
I believe that creating such information concerning consumer brands in developing countries is an exceptionally good entrepreneurial opportunity. Create the data that consumer marketers would love to have, and companies will line up to subscribe to any data services you want to offer.
Someone who understands this lesson is Dr. Jack Detworasutthi, a senior brand manager for internationally branded hair-care products who is responsible for improving sales and profits in Thailand and who has a Ph.D. degree from Rushmore University. He's good at this job, and the brands he is responsible for have high market shares in Thailand.
While understanding the advantages of international brands, it's obvious to Dr. Detworasutthi that Thai brands might be able to do very well against the international brands in many different product categories. If that perception is true, fortunes await consumer marketers around the world who develop domestic brands in the right ways to take advantage of factors such as:
1. Imagery that's unique to that nation
2. Product features that local consumers favor over what the international brands provide
3. Authenticity related to local ingredients and manufacture
4. Unique channels of distribution that are difficult for international brands to
enter
5. Associations with people and institutions that stir much positive emotion among that nation's consumers
Is that entrepreneurial strategy concept only speculation . . . or is it also an opportunity? Dr. Detworasutthi reports that two types of data are needed to find out:
1. Establishing market information for developing nations of the sort that American consumer products companies have about the U.S. market
2. Examining successes and failures of local brands in developing nations while competing with the international consumer brands in light of the expanded market data.
How might an entrepreneur take advantage of the apparent opportunity? Here are some of the ideas that occur to me:
1. Create data-development services that provide information similar to what brand marketers find to be most valuable in economically advanced markets.
2. Consider the possibility of a new business model that would allow the data-development firm to participate in profits from new product successes by identifying opportunities and advising on how to engage in those opportunities.
3. Use the information base created by the data-development work to learn what strategies applied to what opportunities have the highest potential for domestic brands and to implement those ideas in product and service categories where there are no information clients.
What might this enterprise look like? I suppose the company might look a bit like a combination of the best market research firms, sales-and-distribution-tracking organizations, advertising agencies, new-product-development labs, and test market specialists.
Atop these specialist service units inside the company would be account executives with strong marketing and strategy development skills and experience, who would draw from all the specialist activities as needed.
In large markets, such new-product development activities are bound to be provided by separate organizations. In a smaller, developing economy, it's easier to imagine one organization, headed by a CEO who is the acknowledged marketing expert for that country, providing all of these services.
To become such a national expert, an individual might begin by earning a doctorate in marketing studies related to developing local brands for that country. In the process of earning that degree, the entrepreneur should conduct prototypes of all the studies needed by the fully established organization.
With those examples in hand, it would be possible to interest local companies in developing more data. With advance payments received from data subscribers, the organization could be funded through its start-up phase without much need for external investment capital.
If that opportunity seems overwhelming for large population countries such as China, India, Brazil, and Indonesia, entrepreneurs could consider specializing in just a few industries where distribution methods are and will continue to be different from what is usually seen outside of that nation.
Alternatively, a broader industry approach could be taken on a regional basis within the country, focusing first on the higher income locales.
Dr. Detworasutthi is a good example of someone who could engage in such an entrepreneurial opportunity. Here is what he had to say about marketing information needs in Thailand:
"I have found that my country still lacks an adequate information infrastructure, and there will be many people who might be able to apply my research findings in their own business and benefit from my work.
"Relying on international academic and business research is unsatisfactory, as much of it is not applicable to Thailand. This is a major reason for Thailand's failure to develop its economy and society to its full potential.
"So far, the Thai economy has been growing intermittently but it depends too much on foreign investment. We also lack clout and the strong skills of an academic background."
What Dr. Detworasutthi may develop in Thailand, you could do for another country. What are you waiting for?
Author Resource:-
Donald W. Mitchell is a professor at Rushmore University, an online graduate school, who often teaches students interested in career improvement and entrepreneurship through gaining knowledge of advanced business practices. For more information about ways to engage in fruitful lifelong learning at Rushmore to increase your effectiveness and improve your career, visit
http://www.rushmore.edu
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