Our perspective, as businesspeople and marketers, is decidedly global. Yet we are also decidedly hyperlocal. This very Monday, Ira needs to race from a session with our publisher to a school board meeting in the Connecticut town where he lives and where two of his Americans can relate to, especially if they have kids in public schools. Marian has a date with her university alumni club penciled in for this week too, because that's the community that has been one of the most important to her over the last decade.
Hyperlocal ties help people partition the world into manageable chunks.
I might not know how to solve the problems that will arise from Europe's new single currency, but I can create a workable budget for my homeowners' association or chess club. For brands, the push and pull of the global and hyperlocal continuum is somewhat different. A brand can invent desire in Milan using the same triggers that it uses to invent desire in Miami or Memphis or Melbourne, Australia. Transnational commerce is leading, in turn, toward the media globalisation of MTV, CNN, Sony and the magazines in the Conde Nast empire. The trick lies in providing messages that balance universal appeal with sufficient localisation to attract and retain the interest of consumers in each market.