Life Magazine: Marketing Essential Edition April. 2014 | Page 13

Networking is the king
Establishing a new business in Asia,
relationship building is critically
vital to the road of success. In most
of the asian culture, a good
relationship with the locals could
put you in front of your
competition. The issue is to slowly
build up a strong bond with the key
person to create more opportunity
for your company.

!

Decide your marketing
entry strategy
After getting know more about the
local environment including the law
system, financial system, cultural
values and the people. It is time to
set a entry strategy. Many of the
successful firm that had a firm
stand in asian pacific region has a
partnership with the local
government. This kind of
partnership with the government
could ease many difficult process
such as regulations. On the other
hand, privatizing your company
could have flexibility on the
operation of the company.

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!
!
!
!Trial & Error
!
!A complete asian market planning
!strategy and process might works
!
!for IBM but not for Starbucks. This
!is because not every company faces
!the same issues during the time of
!
operation. Even a perfect strategy
has it’s own risk to have loss on
profit. Therefore, the key here is to
do your research and test your
strategy out then leave the rest to
the god to handle.

Attack & Defense strategy
Expanding into a foreign market is
similar to build a castle on the land
of your enemy. Once you have set
foot and have a smooth operation,
competitors will starting to come in
and try to knock you down.
Therefore, a successful company
requires attack strategy just like the
market entry strategy as well as the
defense strategy against any
competitors who try to steal the
slice of your cake.

!
!
!

13

Balance local insights
with global scale
Now that you have firm stand and
successfully established market
presence in a foreign land. The
company operation has
completely adapted into the local
culture. However, to set a unique
selling proposition requires
differentiation strategy. One of the
ways to differentiate among local
competitors is to balance your
insights with the global strategy.

Local talent for the long
haul
One of the major problems many
companies suggest is the
inadequate of talents within the
operation of company in a foreign
land. For a sustainable long term
success, shifting of staffs from
other regions into asian pacific
market is not a viable solution. The
alternative strategy is to harvest
local talents from the land of
operation and setting up training
facilities to nurture young talented
individuals.