Here we will talk about the landing strategy to the market and how to initially launch your products in a specific region. Here that would be Asia, and I will talk about the elite influences between countries and I will conclude with a discussion on market segmentation. So let's start. In a previous segment we talked about how market selection is a process, a step-by-step approach to your market. Of course, you should start with the region after having decided to go abroad. But then you must decide which country and at the end which segment you are going to take as objective. So the landing to the market where you want to arrive really matters because it must be very strategic. I usually use that analogy that marketing is like a war. Imagine that you are attacking a region, you want to attack where strategically makes more sense to attack, where it can be helpful for the future launch of your product. So, this is what is often referred to as an advanced market. And a great example of this in Asia, obviously, is Singapore. Because although Singapore is very small in terms of its population, if you observe the composition of Singapore, its ethnic composition, the fact is that there are not only Chinese people, but Malays, and Hindus all together in this interesting immigrant population. Despite being very small, it works well as a test market. Not only that. If you succeed in Singapore, it generates a big advantage because you will be able to market your products in neighboring countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, even as far as Thailand. So the strategic importance of a country like Singapore can not be overlooked. All right. This is how you initially launch a product and there is a well-established stream of literature in marketing called the diffusion of innovation. And it tells us that only with a few parameters such as knowing how many people innovate to adopt a new product at an early stage, and also how many people follow it, you can decide quite accurately the market potential of your new products. The same applies here. But you must know how many people will adopt your product on an early basis of time. But that is a necessary condition, but not sufficient. You also need a lot of followers to make your product successful. And we can somehow extend the same argument to countries. There are not only individuals who are leaders, but there are also countries that lead and that can influence other countries. Although I will not go into detail in this segment, we learned in another segment that we can identify this community spirit of sharing within Asia with what we call the Asiana cobra brand concept. But I think that can be used in a good way here for the initial launch of your product. So, who is the objective? We have some usual suspects and a good easy target where we can apply this ethical approach which is called segments. Here I refer to Gillespie and Hennessey. These could be people, for example, from the luxury markets and we have luxury consumers everywhere and also mobile consumers. And here we are not limited to the mobility of mobile communications, but we also talk about people who are physically moving. Those who travel a lot. For example, students who study abroad and those who return to their country. They may return to work in their hometowns. So they are very transnational and transcultural in their mentality. And through them you can influence other people, their friends, their family. A great example of this is Starbucks. Although Starbucks arrived in Asia mostly in the late 1990s, it already existed in many countries in Asia this segment ready to buy the product. In Japan it was like that, in Korea too, in China too, in Vietnam it is like that. Although they had not tried Starbucks before, they did it indirectly either through their friends or on Facebook and Twitter or even having seen it in the movies, in the dramas, like Sex and the City. So those are markets that you can almost automatically take advantage of. So, this is how the segments look like to us. We see red and blue circles. They represent, although they may not be the majority in their effective market, markets that are similar after all, either at the top or at the bottom. And in country A we see that there are two types of blue, and the other blue in the top row may mean that it was originally yellow. Which suggests that this segment can promote greater diffusion of the new demand, such as coffee, like in Vietnam where, although Vietnam has a strong culture of drinking coffee, and I mean strong coffee, however perhaps young people prefer a much softer coffee, influenced by imported coffee. So we can use that same kind of argument to talk about how countries influence each other So the countries that lead, it is simply a leadership in opinion or influence that creates trends between countries. And when this happens across a country, It can promote similar demands in other countries. And this influence can be not only based on an economic perspective, it can be from a technology perspective or based on cultural agreements. So a very good example of that is Korea, and Korea has become an elite country. We hear about things like the K-Pop, the K-Drama and K-Beauty. So, if I can rescue an example, It would be the drama called "My Love from the Star". Jun Ji Hyun and Kim Soo Hyun starred in it. And this drama became this epicenter, not only for the drama's demand, but also for many related products that appeared in that program, brands such as Jimmy Choo, Yves Saint Laurent, and Taobao from China, which is an e-commerce site run by Alibaba. So through this drama, we had other products and other brands. That's the impact it has, that's the power that a leading country can have over others, and as marketing experts we must know which countries have that kind of influence. Once we decide the country, we can usually go to the well-known STP concept, Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning, which is a microanalytic approach, and for those who have learned about STP in other courses, you can apply those skills here. But let me emphasize that you do not need to segment in all cases, no, no sir. I think it would be heresy to say that you can not segment the market, but the segmentation must be based on the economy. So there should be a great demand after the segmentation and, in addition, the cost should not be prohibitive. So if the conditions of demand and conditions of the supply are in place, perhaps it is better that you do not perform market segmentation, especially in situations where it there is a very homogeneous demand, like when it is guided by collective behavior. That's the way it is in many countries here in Asia. We learned that there are many bases in segmentation, so I will only say that in the end you need all of them, not only the demographic bases, but also the psychographic information to obtain a much greater Emic understanding of the consumer. And at the end of the day, of course, you want to create a different demand for your product. So in a way it's proceeding towards the kind of profiling of the investigation of consumer science that I mentioned in another segment. Finally, you need the three types of bases to perform four efficient segmentation attempts. To conclude, we learned in this segment that the strategy of landing in the market really matters; so you must choose wisely in which country you want to start. And thenyou have to use that kind of influence, either between people or between countries. And finally, I want to emphasize that market segmentation should be balanced in terms of the type of base used.
