Welcome to the segment Market Landing Strategy. Here we'll talk about Market Landing Strategy and how you initially launched your product in a specific region. Here that will be Asia. And I'll talk about elite influences between countries and I will wrap up with a discussion about market segmentation. So let's get started. In an earlier segment we talked about how market selection is a process. It's a step by step zeroing in on your market and, of course, it has to start with the region after you decide to go abroad. But then you have to decide on which country, and then, ultimately, which segment you want to target. So market landing, where you land, really does matter. Because it has to be very strategic. I've often used this analogy, that marketing is like a war. Say that you're attacking a region. You want to attack it where it makes the most strategic sense. Where it can help you in your future launch of your product. So, this is what is often referred to as a beachhead market. And a great example of that, of course, is Singapore. Because Singapore, even though it's very small in terms of its population, if you look after the composition of Singapore it's sort of ethnic composition. The fact that you have, not only Chinese, but Malay, and Indian, as well this quite significant ex-Pat population. Despite it being very small, nonetheless, it acts as a very good test market. Not only that, if you succeed in Singapore, it does create a lot of leverage in terms of you being able to market many of your products in neighbor countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, and maybe even as far away as Thailand. So the strategic import of a country like Singapore cannot be over evaluated. Okay, so this is how you initially launch a product, and there is this very well established stream of literature in marketing called the diffusion of innovation. And it tells you that, just with a few parameters, such as, knowing how many people innovate, adopt a new product early. And also, how many people follow them that you can predict fairly accurately the market potential of your new product. So the same applies here, too. But you have to know how many people will early adopt your product. But that's the, of course, a necessary condition, but by no means sufficient. You also need many followers for your product to succeed. And we can sort of extend the same argument to countries as well. Not only do you have lead users, but you also have lead influential countries that can influence other countries. Even though I won't go into the details in this segment, we learned in another segment that we can trace this communal sharing spirit within Asia with what I called an Asiana cobra branding concept. I think that can be put to very good use here to initially launch your product. Okay. Who should be the target? There are some usual suspects, and one good easy target where we can apply this ethics approach are called, just like us, segments. Here I'm referencing Gillespie and Hennessey. And these could be people, for example, in the deluxe markets, and you have luxury consumers everywhere, And also mobile consumers. And here we're not just limiting mobile to Mobile communications, but we're talking about people who are physically mobile. Who do a lot of travelling. For example, students who study abroad and who come back to their country. They can return to work back home. So, they are very trans-national and trans-cultural in their mindset. And through them, they can influence other people. So a great example of this is Starbucks. Even though Starbucks entered Asia for the most part in the late 90s, there was already this ready-to-buy Segment in many Asian countries. Japan was like that, Korea was like that, China was like that, Vietnam is like that. And even though they didn't experience Starbucks, they vicariously did through either their friends or on Facebook and Twitter Or they may have seen this in movies. So these are, markets that you can almost automatically tap into. And so this is what, just like, us segments look like. So we see, sort of the red circle and the blue circle. And so they signify, even though they might not be the majority in each market, nonetheless, they are markets that are similar, whether at the high end or at the low end. And in Country A, We see that we have two kinds of blue. And the other blue on the upper row might signify what was formerly yellow. So what that implies is that this small segment can Promote a sort of greater diffusion of new demand, such as with coffee, such as in Vietnam, where even though Vietnam is a strong coffee drinking culture, very strong, by that I mean really strong coffee. Nonetheless, maybe among the younger people They might prefer maybe much more a milder form of coffee, again influenced by coffee being imported from. Okay, so we can use that same kind of argument to talk about how countries influence each other. So lead countries Simply is just opinion leadership, or trendsetting influence between countries. And when this happens, again, through one country you can promote similar sort of convergent demand in other countries. And this influence can be based not only from an economic standpoint. A technological standpoint, or based on cultural assent. So a very good example of that is Korea. And Korea has become elite country. And we hear about things like K Pop and K Drama and K Beauty. So, if I can point to just one example, there was this soap opera called My Love From The Star, and this soap or drama, became this epicenter, for not only demand for the drama But also for many derivative products that were placed in that show. Like brands such as Jimmy Choo and YSL [INAUDIBLE] and Taobao which is an e-commerce site run by Alibaba in China. So through this A drama. Again you had other products other brands being promoted. So this is the impact. This is the power that a lead country may have. And as markers we need to know which countries have this kind of influence. Ok so once we decide on the country, then we can now finally go into the very well known STP concept, which is a very micro-analytical approach. And those of you who have learned about STP in other courses, you can apply That training to very good use here. But let me emphasize though that you don't have to always segment. I think it might be almost heresy to argue that you cannot segment the market, but Again, segmentation should be based on economics. So there should be a greater demand after you segment, and, moreover, the cost should not be prohibitive. So if the demand condition and the supply conditions are not in place, maybe you're better off not segmenting. Your market, especially in situations where you have very homogenous demand. Such as driven by very collective kind of behavior. Segmentation again, we learned that there are many basis Where segmentation, so I will just simply argue that ultimately you need all of them, not only the demographic, the bases, but also the psychographic data to get at a much more emic understanding of a consumer. And at the end of the day, of course, you want to create a differential demand for your product. So, in a way, this, I think, is getting at the consumer science investigation kind of profiling that I spoke of in another segment. So, ultimately You need all three kinds of bases to make for ineffective segmentations scratch. So summing up, we learned in this segment that market landing strategy really matters, and so you have to choose wisely which country you want to start In, and then you have to use that kind of influence, whether it's between people or it's between countries. And lastly, I emphasize that market segmentation has to be balanced in terms of the kindof basis that you use.
