Disrupting Markets, Building Brands: Achieving scale at the BoP is anything but business as usual
Kyle Poplin: In the 2012 book you co-authored, “The New Emerging Market Multinationals: Four Strategies for Disrupting Markets and Building Brands,” and in recent interviews you talk about businesses in emerging markets who are successfully building global brands, often beating out entrenched global players despite a relative lack of resources. What do these brand-building firms have in common?
Amitava Chattopadhyay: They have several things in common.
1. Passion and self-belief: In many emerging markets, there is a self-belief that they can win; a belief they historically did not have. You see this most overtly in China, where people actually will say, “It’s our turn.”
2. Product and process innovation: Unlike or perhaps in addition to labour arbitrage – the typical reason given for the competitive ability of emerging market firms – it is important to realize that they are aggressively pursuing product and process innovation.
3. Putting customers front and center: Consider Indian carmaker Mahindra and Mahindra. Unlike most car companies, they do not develop the chassis first. Rather, they work on the cabin that sits on top, as that is what the customer will touch and feel. They then work backwards from the cabin to create a chassis that will deliver the required drive performance.
4. Focus: The emerging-market multinationals (EMNCs) tend to be more focused than their global counterparts from the developed markets. The focus could be on categories, segments, brands, etc.
5. Integrated and customer-centric marketing strategy: EMNCs are also very careful to ensure that their brand-building efforts are centered on the target customer and carefully integrated to build the brand with their limited resources.
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