Secondly, Asian companies are becoming increasingly competitive and there are now many world-class Asian companies. The implications for marketers of increasingly competitive markets coupled with far more sophisticated and demanding consumers is that they must get to know their consumers to gauge exactly what they want, and they have to work out how to communicate with consumers to get their message across. Sometimes it is a challenge for western companies to recognize simply that Asian markets are different from home markets in all the little details. Their cultures are different from those in home markets, and Asian markets differ from one another. The level of economic development is different from that in European countries or North America and, in some places, we need to consider how we can make marketing work where there is a lack of good logistics and institutional infrastructure and so on.
Marketers tend to focus on China as a vast potential market.
One billion consumers, everybody talks about one billion consumers - that's fantasy. First of all, the vast majority of Chinese people do not have any purchasing power to buy foreign products. Secondly, there is no infrastructure for a national market in China. National distribution is non-existent. Marketers will have to think in terms of systems of local distribution.