Google is a word and activity which has penetrated all aspects of our lives.
This is true for all market segments, whatever is the basis for segmentation, whether demographic, lifestyle, psychographic, geographic or behavioral. The search engine’s name, Google, is a play on the word “googol” which is the number represented by a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. This is undoubtedly a reference to the huge data online.
Google founded in 1998 by two PhD students in Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergei Brin.
With more than 200 million search requests daily, the company has been both a financial and a brand and product success. A public poll has named it as the product which has made the most impact on the consumers’ lives.
With this success, there are competitive responses from industry major players, Microsoft and Yahoo.
It had to happen. All of us who have email addresses have in all great probability received an email from Nigeria. It is not necessary that we know anybody from Nigeria or that we wonder how they have accessed our email address.
There is this letter from somebody who supposed has great wealth in millions of dollars and needs your help in remitting the money out of the country due to whatever restrictions or problems and wants your help so that the money may be used for whatever good it is supposed earmarked for.
In return for your help, you are promised a share of these millions. All you have to do is send some of your money to facilitate all the work and expenses so that the money may be remitted to you.
These expenses keep piling up in tranches. You may even be asked to provide your bank account numbers or credit card numbers.
Sometimes this is embroidered with sob stories about political persecution or health problems.
This is the Nigeria 914 scam. I received many of these types of letters. I have friends who consult me about these email.
I am insulted. As PT Bartnum said, “ A sucker is born every minute.” And this is irrespective of time, technology, education, geography and market segmentation. Look at how all these pyramid schemes proliferate in the Philippines. We do not need another one from Nigeria. Probably we could export our own to other countries.
Or maybe we already have.
It is now the beginning of the year, 2013. We all have our new year’s resolutions. Most companies have done their strategic planning and have their 2013 targets and action plans in place.
It is time to walk the talk. Is this administration clear and positioned? Or CDC? Or CIAC? Or the Filipino?
Some data sourced from Kotler, Marketing Management, An Asian Perspective may provide a basic globalization perspective.
The world population is around 7 billion and wll be more then 7.9 billion by 2025. If the world were a barangay of 1,000 people, it will consist of 520 women and 480 men, 330 children and 60 people over 65, 10 college graduates and 335 illiterate adults.
In terms of religion, there will be 329 Christians, 178 Muslims, 132 Hindus, 62 Buddhists, 3 Jews, 45 atheists, 167 nonreligious and 86 others.
165 people will speak Mandarin, 86 English, 83 Hindu/Urdu, 64 Spanish, 58 Russian, 37 Arabic and the rest one of over 200 other languages.
The barangay will have 52 North Americans, 55 Russians, 84 Latin Americans, 95 vast and West Europeans, 124 Africans and 584 Asians. “ Ni hao ma?”
Any well known global brand, Rolex, Louis Vitton bags, Callaway golf clubs, Adidas shoes, Levi’s jeans, and many others, will have its counterfeit version in Asia. These fakes are sometime so well made that they will be hard to distinguigh from the originals.
Is this nescessarilly bad or is it just part of product development and market evolution?
The market for the fake Levis is not the market for genuine Levis. It is up to the original Levis to maintain its product quality, advantage and differentiation. The buyer of the fake Levis knowns that he is buying a fake and is only willing to pay accordingly. The original Levis is not being deprived of a customer.
What about the theft of the Brand name? That seems to be the main problem. And it may result in a devaluation of the brand equity. However, many in the perfume business now intentionally and transparently create clones or knock-offs of well known major perfume brands and position or sell themselves as precisely imitations.
This is happening in other product categories. We even see it in major retailers like Shoe Mart and Watson for generic brands for Bonus goods and RiteMed medicines.
Toyota founder Kiichiro Toyoda began with a prototype called A1 as a knock-off the Chrysler Desoto Airflow.
However, over time, Toyota finetuned its production operations by developing kanban, pokayoke, obeya, PDCA ( plan, do, check, action) and other systems to become according to “Dawson, Blazing the Toyota Way” “ by nearly every measure the world’s best auto manufactuer.” Are we learning?
