Are you export-ready for Asia?

The first step to succeeding in exporting to Asia is overcoming a couple of key mental hurdles

Every journey starts with a single step, but it can also be the point at which you put your first foot wrong. There are two main ways to ensure failure at exporting to Asia. The first is not to even try it, because you talk yourself out of it, limiting your ambitions to other, more familiar markets. Peter Enderwick, Professor of International Business at AUT, is targeting the engineering and building sectors on this one.

“The companies were focused on the Rugby World Cup, now they are focused on rebuilding Christchurch. Most of them don’t seem to be interested in the massive infrastructure projects happening in India and China – it’s just too attractive to stay in this market.”

So if you don’t really want to be rich and have the opportunity to innovate on the cutting edge, then stop reading now.

The second problem, at the opposite end of the bravado scale, is to believe you are ready before you really are.

Alan Gourdie, a former Telecom Retail chief executive and global marketing manager for Heineken, is now adding his expertise to design agency Designworks as a non-executive director.

“We often talk about companies being export-ready and their brands being export-ready,” Gourdie says. “What we mean is how well they are defined in terms of their architecture and fit with the identified consumer. There is no room for error there – you have to be absolutely locked down. Any looseness in language or definition gets amplified as you go into the market, so having a very clear shape to your proposition from a brand point of view and a product point of view is critical.”

The first thing you need for success in Asia, then, is the same thing you need for success anywhere. You need to know exactly who you are as a business, what you stand for, what sets you apart and what you want to achieve.

According to Designworks chief executive officer Sven Baker, “You need to be absolutely crystal-clear on what your proposition means.”

You need to be able to say clearly what your company does better than anybody else, or more accurately, everybody else that is currently wading into the Asian market. There is a tendency to think that if you’re quite good at making X, the odds are that there must be millions of new middle-class Chinese people who might want it, and you might be right. But you might also be catastrophically wrong once you realise that everybody else that makes X or its equivalent has thought the same thing and you are entering one of the most competitive markets in the world.

As Gourdie puts it: “Nobody is waiting for you.”