Look before you leap
Asia’s big enough and old enough to be creating anything its heart desires. So how do you tap into that desire?
“Things like our way of doing business and our welcoming attitude are absolutely things that we should be taking into the market that go beyond the story of provenance and place to the way of thinking that drives us in our endeavour to do the things we do,” he says.
It’s worth remembering, too, that concepts such as ‘German engineering ’ do not only mean ‘Engineered in Germany’ they reflect a certain way of doing things, which is something we should be looking to create as we operate as New Zealand ambassadors to export markets such as Asia.
Obviously, part of the trick of this is knowing which parts of this ‘Kiwi’ or New Zealand value to carry over into other markets you are targeting. We might not want to turn up to board meetings in China in jandals and a singlet if we want to be taken seriously, for example. One pointer is that many Chinese start from the position that a local brand is better than an overseas one, unless proven otherwise. This goes some way to explaining Fonterra’s strong position in dairy, because local brands have been perceived as unable to provide the quality and safety desired, and the rapid shift into problems when that hard-earned advantage is damaged.
Gourdie explains this by breaking it down into the proposition and the route to market. He argues that a if a proposition works well in one market, then it will have a pretty good chance, at least on an idea level, of resonating elsewhere. But the actual route to market has to carefully reflect the nuances of the export market itself. To put it another way – Asian consumers might like beer just as much as we do, but they might like to buy it, drink it and think about it in ways that are significantly different to us.
‘You can’t have a lot of ideas without the structure behind it. It’s about the people behind it, the culture behind it, how the business is structured and resourced’
Noel Blackwell, Designworks
The basics of business are the same the world over. To be succesful you need to connect what you’re offering as closely as possible with what your customers want. The first thing to mention is that these days they have to want you – your business, your attitude and your approach, not just the product or service you provide. Let’s face it, the markets in Asia are big enough and clever enough that they could create themselves pretty much whatever specific product or service you can come up. So as the old song lyric goes ‘t’ain’t what you do (it’s the way that you do it)’. Noel Blackwell, group head of strategy for Designworks, concurs. “You can’t have a lot of ideas without the structure behind it. It’s about the people behind it, the culture behind it, how the business is structured and resourced.”
Gestro adds: “Any company should do a lot of research on the market, but they often don’t really know enough about themselves and what they’re trying to achieve. And if there is a mismatch between that and the market dynamics it could end up a failure.”
In most cases this means it pays to know a lot about who we are as New Zealanders, too – or at least how we are seen in these markets. There’s been a lot of work done on this of late, with Tourism New Zealand, NZTE and Education New Zealand working on developing an overarching ‘New Zealand Story’ that is due out any day. This is intended to enhance the ways in which we can leverage off this, both at home and abroad. Enderwick believes this is good news for New Zealand exports. “We have Pure New Zealand, clean green and all of that sort of thing, linking food stuffs and particularly dairy to tourism, international education and a safe clean environment,” he says. “The problem is that if you start from the position of being ‘100% Pure’ you can only go down, and you’re vulnerable to breaches and the increasing evidence that it is not the case.”
Whatever you might think about the importance of our clean, green image, to export succesfully into the Asian market you’re going to need to be armed with something a little more sophisticated and subtle.
Baker says there’s increasing recognition to those other dimensions of the New Zealand story.