The Case for Localization in Today's World: My Perspective
The world is really big and every culture in it has their own traditions, language, beliefs, lifestyles, rules, rituals and customs. Therefore, every business should find his own way of localization their products to another culture. This is “I am for localization in this contemporary world” essay where I will reveal this topic.
Localized ways of accomplishing goals people in business usually call “strategies” and there are actually many of them. Due to these strategies the company can have an idea of how to successfully sell their products in other countries. In other words, “marketing” your business in other cultures. However, the best way to understand the process of product localization is through “case studies”, which showing us the real-life example of a specific company in a specific country. Therefore, I will tell the story of successful worldwide companies such as “McDonald's”, “Honda”, “UPS”, “Hyundai” and “Samsung”, where we can see which strategies they used to accomplish their goals.
The first example I have found in “ASIAN CASE RESEARCH JOURNAL (2015)” with the name of the article “Hyundai Motor Company in the Indian Market”. Where they are telling us the story of entering India with the new model of the Hyundai car specialized for this specific culture. ”HMI intended to develop a “people’s car” to suit the climate and lifestyle of the Indian people. HMI applied new technologies and components instead of reusing domestic models”. They decided to make a “compact” vehicle in order for the costumes to pay fewer taxes. By doing that they could pay 12 percent less tax than bigger once. Since these increases compact car became the most popular on the market, 78% of the population were using small cars. In addition, it was way easier “to weave through India’s congested roads” and rich people were able to buy few cars for every member of the family. “To take advantage of such conditions, HMI began adapting the Korean Atoz to suit India”. However, the appearance of this car was really similar to the local taxi cab, which did not attract the population. Therefore, “HMI” decided to change the design of the car and at the same time to take into the account the conditions “of Indian driver’ habits” such as climate, lifestyle“. The hot and humid weather of India placed a great load on an engine’s cooling and air conditioning systems. To handle roads with poor drainage during heavy rainfall, the vehicle’s water resistance was enhanced.h To deal with unregulated roads with jaywalkers and sacred cows, the horn was made louder.” In the end, to absolutely erase the connection with the previous model of the car (Atoz), HMI changed it to “Santro”. Their next task was to fix the prejudice of the Indian people forward Hyundai, so they decided to advertise Santro with the local and beloved movie star Shahrukh Khan. This promotion worked and Santro became popular. (?) “With full-scale marketing through national roadshows and customer service, word began to spread, and 6 months after its initial release, Santro began to increase sales”.
The second example, we get from the “Profiting from Localized Global Strategy” about the Honda’s experience. Accordingly to “Hideo Siguria” the first attempts of localization were unsuccessful. However, this experience showed to the company their mistake: “to understand and respond to differences in history, culture, and values”. Therefore, the best way for a successful start-up in another culture is to follow these four strategies suggested by “Siguria to MIT”. First one is “Localization of product” which suggest selling the product that is not on the market yet in a specific location for a specific reason. The second strategy called “Localization of profits” shows to us that the company should consider itself as a local and invest the maximum of the profits locally. The next one is “Localization of production”. The last strategy advice that managers and employees should know the culture of the place where they are cooperating, and they call it “Localization of management”. Finally, all the strategies together lead to a positive result in product localization and the real-life example of that is “Honda” corporation.
Ray Kroc (the founder of McDonald's) believed that if you “take care of those who work for you… you will float to greatness on their achievements.” This citation introducing us to the next case study of localization McDonald’s to China, which was written by Joyce Jenkins in 2008 with the name of the article 'Cooking Up a Recipe for Effective Leadership”, page 16-17. The first restaurant in China company opened in 1990, and today they have around 800 restaurants in China. Accordingly, to the article, their main strategy was “a premium employee development” which means that the company should find a local leadership talent and develop it. McDonald’s vice president of human resources and organization for the Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa (APMEA) region - Lismen Chan “believes that the best people to grow the business in a particular country are individuals from that country”. In other words, for a successful localization, McDonald's were finding the talented employees from that culture and were developing their skills, which in future helped them to have employees that are talented, trained and with a good knowledge of the local culture.
Finally, we can conclude that one of the most important things in the process of localization the product to the unknown culture is to decide which strategy you will apply. For example, in the case of the McDonald's the directors used the strategy of the strong leadership. The second company sold their product (Hyundai car) in India by considering all the needs of the population. While in these two cases the companies adhered to one strategy the last one had and four of them. Relying on the results of the companies actions, we can conclude that every strategy is running properly.
