FHV – Marketing In Emerging Markets

Let’s get going with some big terms and basic insights on emerging markets/countries.

Emerging markets are nations with social or business activity in the process of rapid growth and industrialization.

Since a couple of years different terms are being used to talk about countries in this process: Newly Industrialised Countries, Emerging Economies, Rapidly Developing Countries, ….
The largest developing countries are mostly specified by the term BRIC that stands for Brazil, Russia, India, and China,along with BRICET (BRIC + Eastern Europe and Turkey), BRICS (BRIC + South Africa), BRICM (BRIC + Mexico), BRICK (BRIC + South Korea), Next Eleven (Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, Turkey, and Vietnam) and CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa).

If you’re looking for opportunity then you have to look at these emerging/new markets.  How to implement an introduction or growth strategy in these new markets can be a bumpy road! If asked at CEO’s worldwide (in a study from Deloitte) they come up with these conclusions and recommandations.

The greatest success in emerging markets doesn’t come from simply establishing a sales office and selling their existing products and services. Instead, it are the special requirements of customers in each emerging market and the designed offerings to meet their needs at market appropriate prices that are key success factors. Another key ingredient in success is to establish company-owned production, service, distribution, R&D and other operations in emerging markets to become closer to customers and part of the local business community.

Executives see the greatest opportunities and strategies in the following:

• Opportunities remain in the BRIC (minus Russia). Among 10 leading emerging markets, executives surveyed were most likely to expect revenue increases of 25 percent or more over the next three years in Brazil, India and China.
• Bigger is better. According to respondents whose companies had revenues of $5 billion or greater—those larger companies were more likely to have exceeded their sales revenue goals in emerging markets over the last three years, while small companies (less than $500 million in revenue) were the least likely to have done so.
• Go local. Companies that had company-owned operations in at least five of six major emerging markets were much more likely to have exceeded their revenue goals. In addition, some successful strategies were using local sales/service centers, employing company-owned sales and distribution and employing a company-owned supply chain. Local operations may provide advantages such as greater knowledge of customer needs and buying habits, greater brand awareness in the market and more experience in navigating government approvals and procedures.
• Know your customer. Designing products specifically for customers in the local market and offering a different value proposition were considered as among the most successful strategies. When it came to challenges identified by survey participants, one of the top challenges in five of the six emerging markets studied was to provide products/services that meet customer needs at prices they can afford.

In this course we’ll focus on a dual aspect

• looking at the emerging countries/markets from demografic, sociologial and (macro)economical aspect
• looking at building and launching a brand in these markets

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerging_markets
http://www.internationalbusinessreport.com/Reports/2010/Reports/emerging_markets/index.asp
http://www.deloitte.com/view/en_US/us/Services/consulting/Strategy-Operations/b2b6eb7eec523310VgnVCM3000001c56f00aRCRD.htm

http://www.spicers.co.nz/articles/financial-update-newsletter/global-recovery (graph1)
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/06/focus-3 (graph2)
http://www.globalintelligence.com/insights-analysis/bulletins/uk-companies-say-indonesia-south-africa-turkey-top (graph3)