The debate of whether to be global or local has been an important strategic issue for the past several decades.  The case describes Johnnie Walker’s efforts to move from a multi-local product focused brand to a global master brand.  It makes the  point that global branding is a strategic business decision. It requires an understanding of a global customer need that the master brand can authentically speak to and position around. The brand then needs to manage the the standardization of marketing activities across markets, which requires significant internal changes in structure and process, to be successful.  The case presents consumer data confronting Johnnie Walker and asks the question: What should Johnnie Walker’s global positioning be? How should the brand be managed? What should be the key next steps to build the Johnnie Walker brand?

A couple of years ago HTC was, if anything, nosing ahead of Samsung in smartphones. In fact, in the last quarter of 2011, HTC had become the bestselling smartphone brand in the US! An amazing achievement for a firm that entered the branded business only in 2004! Then HTC slid, and the last two and a half years years have been a struggle for the brand. What went wrong?

Thinking about it, it struck me that the big difference between HTC and Samsung is that Samsung has moved on to provide an eco-system of consumer electronic products, both personal (e.g., smartphones, cameras, pads, notebooks) and family (e.g., TVs) that connect and talk together, while HTC has not moved beyond smartphones and pads.

Not only do the various Samsung products talk to each other, but Samsung has launched the Kies software which allows Samsung users to organize and move content easily from one device to another. This is the capability that made Apple such a successful brand in the first place.

The lesson for building a successful consumer electronics brand, then, is not just that one must have good products, but that one needs to be able to offer an integrated eco-system of products that seamlessly connect to each other as well as easy-to-use software that helps the consumer readily acquire, organize, and manage content across devices.

I wonder if HTC is making a move in this direction? I clearly preferred the HTC One smartphone over the Samsung Galaxy S4, when I acquired a new smartphone last year, but I bought the Samsung Galaxy S4, as it made my life overall simpler. I hope your listening, HTC!

Emerging market economies have experienced hard times of late. In India, FY13 GDP growth was the slowest in 10 years and the rupee hit a record low against the US dollar. Many foreign companies are retracting their investments and leaving the government struggling to turn back the tide. Other EM giants Brazil and China have also come under the spotlight as national growth rates plateaued and fell throughout the first quarter of 2014.

However, despite turbulent times in their home markets, the outlook for EM corporations is rosy.

Mindray Medical International Limited was the second largest medical device manufacturer in China with global sales of 2.23 billion RMB in 2007. Since 2002, Mindray had launched between seven and nine new products every year across four product lines: Patient Monitoring & Life Support products, the In-Vitro Diagnostic Products, Medical Imaging Systems and Veterinary. In 2006, Mindray’s American depositary shares (ADS) were listed on the New York Stock Exchange. By the end of 2007, Mindray had sold medical devices to over 37,500 hospitals and clinics in China. It had 12 international offices and its products were sold in more than 140 countries.

However, the company’s US performance had not lived up to expectation and, recently, Mindray founder and chairman Hang Xu had been approached by a leading investment bank to discuss the potential acquisition of Datascope, a mid-sized American producer of medical devices for the global marketplace. What should Xu do?

China is sitting on a cash pile of US$3.8 trillion and recent data suggests that its outbound direct investments (ODI) have risen to almost the same level as in-bound foreign direct investment (FDI). If the trend continues, China will soon be a net outbound investor.

One key area for investment could and perhaps should be in acquiring international brands that would enable, particularly the Chinese national champions and the other large players (there are 89 Chinese companies in the latest Fortune Global 500 list), to leap on to the world stage rapidly and without the baggage of the Chinese country-of-origin (see last week’s blog).

The challenge, should we see a spate of such acquisitions, will be integration. The history of Chinese international acquisitions is mixed, much more so than that of companies from its other large Asian neighbor, India. Thus, for instance, TCL acquired Thompson of France back in the early days of this century, an acquisition that almost took it under.

Why did the acquisition fail? On the one hand, TCL’s bet on the rear-projection TV technology, a technology in which Thompson was a leader, did not pan out, as plasma and LCD screens came to dominate that industry. But, equally, TCL struggled with the integration of Thompson in to its business. Cultural differences in many ways proved insurmountable.

So what can Chinese acquirers learn from the much more successful acquisitions undertaken by Indian firms? The most important lesson is, humility is essential. While Chinese firms are arrogant and believe like many Western acquirers, that there is little to learn from the acquired company and that they can improve the performance of the acquired company by implementing their own and superior systems and processes, injecting their superior and more hardworking executives to “run the show”, and doing so at the much faster “China speed” that they are used to, Indian firms acquire with the view to learn what is good from the acquired company, improve what is not so good by injecting their own capabilities, and doing so gradually. In some sense, the old adage of being slow and steady to win the race applies equally to acquisitions.

To take this more humble but successful approach, perhaps the most difficult step will be to learn humility. Swept away by the “China Dream”–an idea that has been around for a while, but now is reaching fever pitch, pushed by the efforts of the current administration under President Xi Jinping–there is a general view of Chinese superiority which blinds acquirers to the superior aspects of the acquired firm, which, ironically, was the reason for the acquisition in the first place!

With humility in place, the rest is relatively easy. You can read more about that in my “The New Emerging Market Multinationals: Four Strategies for Disrupting Markets and Building Brands”. Indeed, a bit of humility and with the right acquisition team and process, Chinese companies could start becoming the acquirers of choice, just as the Indian acquirers have successfully become.