What's In Here
Here's a review, a sense of upcoming attractions, and an assignment.
Assignment
We can't all go to Hong Kong but we can experience international retail here at home.
The assignment: get together with any two to four of your colleagues. Visit an ethnic store or restaurant. Here are some examples: you may find others. Buy something (or eat something). With your colleagues, note what is surprising, different, and the same. Think about how these store keepers are doing international business: ask where products come from, consider what their market is. Don't photograph without permission. We'll talk about it Thursday next week. This will take an hour out of your weekend or after-class time, but you have to eat sometime, so try the Pho (pronounced "Fuh" with a rising accent). Or try some Indian sweets or some Mexican "pan dulce." (Mariachi and Primavera have a nice selection of the latter.
• El Mariachi Grocery, just past Brookland Baptist on Sunset, West Columbia.
• The Taqueria and Grocery behind China Hut III, 12 Street Plaza
• Tienda y Panadería Primaera, (about) 1818 Agusta Road, West Columbia, SC
• Pho Viet,
Review
For the lexicon:
Ethnocentric: using your own cultural lens to interpret and especially to evaluate some other cultural pattern, tradition, behavior, or belief. Like what counts as "crowded" or "big" or "attractive" to you may mean something else to someone else.
Empirical: what you see, hear, sense, observe: but without the evaluative or (often) comparative component.
We looked at Russian Grocery stores in today's Russia:
Here's how X5 retail tells the history of their group. Its an infomercial in Russian, but with subtitles; take a look.
We watched this in class. (The Russian giving the tour has a potty mouth, so be aware that we don't endorse that sort of language, but the grocery tour is worth a look). We discussed what is different, what is the same, what seemed odd.
Boilerplate: in a contract, its the standard language, including fixed terms. Old sales guys that I know talked about "boilerplate" pricing, meaning a 100% mark-up. That standard pricing was just that simple. That's what LUX was doing in Russia: using a "double the price" to find the sales price, instead of working through their actual costs and pricing to meet the market on that basis.
For Future Reference
When learning about another environment—a Russian supermarket, for example— you will notice things that seem odd, out of place, unusual. That's fine. Notice those things. But try to break them down into "here's what was there" versus "here's what I think about it, how I evaluate it, how I like it or think its odd or difficult."
So, as you take notes on a new place (like, when you interview someone, or visit a different sort of place) consider dividing your notes in half. On the left, your empirical observations. On the right, your evaluations, feelings, or analysis. For international marketers discovering new retail forms, knowing where your evaluations come from helps you recognize important points of difference—and connections.
LUX Case and next reading and upcoming presentations
Do read through the LUX case on the right. We'll discuss the LUX company options, and look at where the market is, and where it is going, now.
We've been talking about Channels (chapter 12). For your next presentation (after we hear from China, on Thursday) we'll back up and review these from Keegan: Product Decisions and Pricing. We looked at the pricing in the Russian grocery store—you may be thinking about exchange rates. And we talked about the problems with pricing as "boilerplate" in the LUX case—they didn't include their overhead in their pricing.
Refer to the syllabus about the last presentation. We'll discuss details tomorrow, after we hear from China and their presentation.
Chapter 10: Product decisions (much of this has been covered in class, and you may have skimmed around in Chapter 10, right?)
Chapter 11: Pricing decisions.
Next week, we'll explore a bit of cross-cultural communication (Neogy: the little book) and, if Monica is available, we'll learn about social media in international setting, especially the Totto company's efforts in Latin America.
No comments:
Post a Comment