Framework library · International strategy
Glocalisation strategy
Glocalisation keeps the parts of an offer that gain from being the same everywhere, such as the platform, the core product and often the brand, and adapts the parts that local customers, regulators or channels require. The discipline is to make that call one element at a time, with a reason and a cost for every change, instead of treating standardise or adapt as a single decision for the whole business.
Use it when
- You are taking a product or service into a new country or region and need to decide what changes.
- Country teams keep asking for local versions and you need a principled way to agree to some and refuse others.
- The cost of variants has crept up and you want to see which adaptations pay for themselves.
- A product built for one market is being sold through partners abroad, and the partners are asking for changes.
Avoid it when
- You have not yet decided whether to enter the market. Use a country selection matrix or a market entry strategy first.
- The question is how to run the whole company across countries rather than how to adapt one offer. Use the integration-responsiveness framework.
- The offer is bought on specification and price alone, such as wholesale capacity. There is little to adapt beyond price and contract terms.
How to run it
List the elements of the offer
Product, brand, price, channel, promotion, service, packaging and documentation, and the organisation behind them. Split an element when its parts get different answers, such as hardware and radio settings.
Start every element at the global standard
Assume each element stays as it is and make the case for changing it. Standardisation is the default because it carries the economics of scale. Adaptation has to earn its cost.
Name the reason for each change
A customer need, a regulation, a channel requirement or a competitor's price. "The market is different" is not a reason; "type approval requires a different power supply" is.
Choose the level of adaptation
Global standard (unchanged), adapt (same core, local changes) or fully local (designed or run in the market). Most elements of a good glocal offer sit in the first two.
Cost every adaptation
Put a first-year cost on each, including margin given up on price and the cost of running a variant, not only the one-off engineering.
Protect the shared core
Write down which elements nobody may adapt without central approval, and why. Requests to adapt arrive one at a time and each looks reasonable on its own.
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Mistakes to avoid
- Adapting everything to please each country, which turns one product into several and loses the scale that made it competitive. Count the elements kept standard as carefully as the ones changed.
- Leaving price out because it is not a design change. Price is often the largest adaptation, paid every year in margin.
- Letting software or firmware fork for one market. Each fork has to be maintained for as long as the product lives. Adapt through configuration where you can.
- Assuming the brand must change. Many business buyers expect a global supplier to look the same everywhere.
Where it comes from
The word comes from Japanese business usage of the 1980s, where it rendered dochakuka, a term for adapting methods to local conditions. Roland Robertson took it into social science, notably in "Glocalization: time-space and homogeneity-heterogeneity", in Featherstone, Lash and Robertson (eds), Global Modernities (Sage, 1995). As a business method it has no single originator: it applies to one offer the trade-off between global integration and local responsiveness that C. K. Prahalad and Yves Doz set out in The Multinational Mission (1987). Source.
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