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Big Next: Global vs Hyperlocal
As the world gets smaller and smaller, we aren’t just becoming more globally aware, we’re also becoming increasingly focused on the hyperlocal places and communities in our lives. The authors of this book are decidedly global. In a typical few months Ira holidayed with his family in Italy and visited Berlin with Marian to speak to international business people and journalists. Marian also travelled to Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) in the course of her job.
The two of us are also decidedly hyperlocal. In a representative week Ira raced from a session with a prospective publisher to a school board meeting in the Connecticut town where he lives, and where one of his children attends a public elementary school. He also belongs to a number of committees related to the advertising community that do good works. Meanwhile, Marian had a date with her university alumni club, because that’s the community that has been the most important to her over the last decade. She also attended a Women in New Media breakfast – networking is an eighties buzzword that in the nineties translates into forging hyperlocal ties.
It seems to us that achieving a balance between global and hyperlocal will be of increasing importance both to people and brands in the years ahead. For people, hyperlocal ties help us to partition the world into manageable chunks. I may not know how to solve the problems that may arise from Europe’s new single currency, but I can create a workable budget for my homeowners’ association or chess club. I may feel a bit overwhelmed when surfing through Usenet newsgroups, but I feel very much at home when chatting with people in my online hobbyist group.
For brands, the push and pull of the global and hyperlocal continuum is somewhat different. Aided by their embrace of new technologies – which keep them plugged into world events and points of view – new consumers have developed the rudiments of a global outlook that infuses the way they think, the way they act – the way they buy. Transnational commerce is leading, in turn, towards media globalization. As the ‘global consumer’ becomes more of a reality, we’re seeing a deepening awareness that marketing messages can – and should – be transmitted across borders. Disney, Coke, Nikon, Apple, IBM, Levi’s and Nike are just some of the brands already globally consistent.
Today’s drive towards globalization means companies need to make hard decisions on everything, from whether brand names need to be globally consistent to which brand messages translate across cultures, to what logo or icon can best represent their brand around the world. Not every company can have a symbol as globally recognized as the Nike swoosh – but all of them would like to! As brands consider the implications of going global, it’s important that they recognize, too, the enormous draw of hyperlocal connections. Forging hyperlocal links with consumers is a must for tomorrow’s brands – no matter how global. The trick lies in providing messages that balance universal appeal with sufficient ‘localization’ to attract and retain the interest of consumers in each market. In fact, we can safely assume that tomorrow’s mass-appeal brands will share three commonalities: global relevance, hyperlocal desirability and strong ties to multiple niches.
How can a product have both global relevance and hyperlocal appeal? Some smart brands will take advantage of convergence opportunities. When done right, convergence is about brands bonding because their combined power is greater than the sum of their parts. Moving forward, we can expect to see global champions such as Frito-Lay co-brand with such local winners as the Netherlands’ Smith’s crisps, thereby ensuring that ubiquity and familiarity are in sync.
Smart marketers are also coming up with other ways to give mass-produced products local appeal. How many of us have been fooled by seemingly ‘homegrown’ microbrews and speciality snack products in our grocery stores, which are, in fact, manufactured by the very same conglomerates selling mass products a bit further down the aisle? Slap on a local-sounding name or the colours of a local sports team, and consumers are apt not to read the small print about the product’s true origins.
In the fast-food world, the Jollibee chain is a good example of how to combine successfully a global product with local touches. Although the Filipino chain sells hamburgers, it tailors these ‘all-American delights’ to suit the local market’s tastes (Jollibee’s hamburgers in the Philippines, for instance, come with sweet-and-sour sauce flavouring.) The result: Jollibee has not only outmanoeuvred McDonald’s in the Philippines, but has also opened multiple outlets in south-east Asia and the Middle East. Jollibee recently took on McDonald’s on its home turf, opening outlets in San Francisco and Los Angeles, home to large Filipino populations.
On a city level, one can see how globality and hyperlocality can co-exist and actually enrich one another. Amsterdam, for instance, despite being a comfortable participant on the world stage, has managed to retain a sense of being a village of locals. When Adidas, one of the most on-trend brands in the world, relocated many of its creative, marketing, promotions and sales functions to Amsterdam, the Dutch press explained it thus: ‘Amsterdam is chosen as second headquarters for its international cosmopolitan feel, in a village setting; a wonderful lifestyle.’
Contrast the June 1997 European Union summit (a.k.a. Eurotop) in Amsterdam with the Olympic Games at Nagano. The Amsterdam event felt as if the world had been invited to a New Age picnic (BYOB) and musical celebration of the future. In striking contrast, the rural, sleepy, isolated village of Nagano, in Japan, seemed to be resisting the exhortations of CBS to ‘spend a moment with the world’. Amidst reports that local businesses were actually turning away ‘foreigners’, the prevailing view of the townsfolk was that this intrusion from the outside world was simply to be ‘suffered’ as they eagerly awaited a return to anonymity.
Big Next: Nostalgia and Futurism: a Winning Yin and Yang
Throughout our global village, residents are being asked to accommodate change at an unprecedented pace. As the new world order demands that we adapt to a broad array of new cultural, political, economic and technological influences, we can’t fail to recognize the truth in the adage, ‘Change is life’s only constant.’
In the West, anxiety about change is exacerbated by premillennial tension. As observed by John Naisbitt, the millennium is a metaphor for the future; wrapped up in it are our greatest hopes – and our greatest fears. We’re uncertain how the changes to come will affect us personally. The result has been oscillation between optimism and anxiety. Indeed, the two of us have been struck by how much of society’s ‘future view’ is caught up in such paradoxes. Today’s trends include a push towards risk and safety, indulgence and cost-consciousness. But no paradox is as interesting, nor as marketable, as that of nostalgia and futurism. As put by marketing consultant James Rosenfield, ‘People seem to be trying on both the past and the future for size.’1
These co-existing tendencies toward nostalgia and futurism are not unexpected – when confronted with accelerated change, people gravitate to that which is most familiar and most comfortable, whether it be a particular brand of food, an old TV show or a retro fashion. But because swearing off the future and change is simply not an option, we alleviate our anxieties by finding a balance between what has been, what is and what is to come. The exact ‘comfort’ equation is as unique to each individual as his or her fingerprints, but most involve creating a sturdy bridge that spans past, present, and future. Marketers and product developers must take this consumer duality into account in order to strike a balance that’s appropriate for their target. Chanel’s fall ’98 ready-to-wear collection rose to the challenge by featuring both very, very long skirts (a nod to the attire of Coco’s youth) and a new bag designed for the millennium called ‘2005’.
When we consider brands for the future (a.k.a. millennium brands), it’s clear to us that, whether classic or newly minted, these brands will share a capacity to be reinvented, reinterpreted and reoriented at an extraordinary rate. Rather than be motivated by a chameleon-like hypocrisy, such change will be an extension of the brand’s guiding force. Authenticity is also all-important. Worn down by an endless barrage of questionable product claims and an unrelenting need to ‘read the fine print’, consumers gravitate towards – and actively seek out – people and products that deliver honesty and integrity.
The fact that Citibank sponsored Elton John’s 1998 world tour speaks worlds about that brand’s commitment to being what its customers need it to be: honest, human, humane and spirited. What more could a brand ask for than a celebrity endorser who has aired all and been lauded for his integrity, for his passion for his art and for the causes he’s supported and moved the world to support? When we consider Sir Elton John, we are really considering the quintessential millennium brand, an individual who has risen above his blemishes and warts, has been transported by his ambition, commitment and talent, and who remains firmly rooted in the real world while he lives a life far beyond anything a working-class kid from England could have ever imagined. Elton John is a millennial brand because he is trusted, because he is genuine – and because he is familiar. We know him, and we draw comfort from that.
Smart marketers have been quick to take advantage of consumers’ nostalgic leanings. Microsoft launched Windows 95 with help from the Rolling Stones; Nissan reconnected to its history with the aid of Van Halen and G.I. Joe. Around the world, we’re most definitely seeing a rise in ‘stake claiming’ to the past, as companies work to ensure that tomorrow is familiar because of its linkage to yesterday. Going forwards, we’ll see that the most effective marketing strategies meld the essence of nostalgia (reliability, quality, beauty, familiarity) with the positive elements of futurism (functionality, convenience, versatility).
Big Next: ‘Perpetual Youth’ and our Ageing World
It used to be that people over fifty were old, and people under thirty were young. Then Mick Jagger turned fifty and continued to strut his stuff on-stage, and our entire theory of ageing had to be revamped. Today, ‘midlife crises’ occur not on one’s thirty-fifth birthday, but on one’s forty-fifth, fifty-fifth or even later. Men and women in their seventies and eighties are remaining physically (even sexually) active, travelling the world, and are sometimes even involved in running companies – and countries.
Throughout much of Europe and North America, women are delaying childbirth until their thirties or even forties. Adults are running around in tennis shoes and short shorts, working out at the gym in an attempt to delay some of the normal ravages of ageing – and having plastic surgery to mask much of the rest. The fashion industry has been forced to redesign its ‘youth’ fashions to fit the bodies of the middle-aged men and women who continue to wear them rather than adopting more ‘grown-up’ fashions.
In the years ahead, expect the world’s ‘elders’ (whether ageing boomers or their parents) to command unprecedented attention from marketers and the media, and to have an enormous impact on the rest of the population. The reality is that we’re entering into an era in which the elderly will make up a larger proportion of the global population than ever before. Already, the most rapidly growing age group is made up of those aged eighty-five plus. In the US this group will double in size by 2025 and increase fivefold by 2050. Consider the implications: By the year 2030, approximately 20 per cent of the US population will be over age sixty-five. That’s 69 million people. Around the world, half of all people aged sixty-five and over who have ever lived are alive today.
Our ageing population promises to influence everything from financial planning and home design to the way products are made and sold. Likely developments include everything from ‘adult friendly’ caps on medicine bottles to wider car doors and foods that compensate for changing tastes and dietary needs. We’ll also see even greater shifts with regard to our attitudes regarding what it means to ‘age’. As the number of elderly continues to increase, so will this group’s power in terms of influencing public policy. Images of the elderly as victims will become historical; instead we will see seniors who grow more active in politics and who maintain and even increase their economic power as they move fully into their second half century of life. Socially, politically – and certainly economically – the implications of this ‘Big Next’ will be felt by us all.
We’ve chosen to place our final two Big Nexts – the United States of Europe and an Independent Asia – in a separate chapter. These Big Nexts differ from our usual ‘stock in trade’ in that they focus on geopolitics and regional economics rather than on consumerism, popular culture and the like. Whether one lives in one of the regions in question or in the Americas, Africa or elsewhere, the implications of life next in Europe and Asia will be enormous.
[2] It’s a Small World Next
Big Next: United States of Europe
For many of Europe’s 350 million-plus citizens, the next five to ten years will be the most exciting, promising, and/or disturbing era of their lives. Only those with vivid memories of the 1939–45 war or the radical sixties might find these millennial years less than seminal. The quarrelsome patchwork of nations, peoples, cultures, economies, climates and topographies loosely known as Europe is facing the next millennium more united – or at least more closely bound together – than anyone could have dreamed just fifty years ago.
Brussels
The capital of Belgium has become shorthand for the ambitious project of European integration that started in the early 1950s. The changing names of the project over the decades reflect the broadening ambitions of the ‘Eurocrats’ and the visionary politicians who have driven it – the European Coal and Steel Community (1952), the European Economic Community (1957), the European Community (1967) and now, the European Union (1993). What started out as a forum for collaboration among six countries in a limited area of industry has evolved into nothing less than a drive to create, in effect, a United States of Europe, with its own single currency and supranational legislature currently covering fifteen countries, with more in the waiting room.
Not everybody in Europe is on board. The sort of people who used to be known as ‘right wing’ – typified by Britain’s Conservative Party and its former leader Margaret Thatcher – resent the political dimension. They think the project should stick to fostering trade and commerce and keep its hands off social policy, let alone political integration. Some ‘left-wing’ Europeans see the whole thing as a vehicle for big business to have its wicked way with workers, playing off those in high-wage countries against those in lower-cost areas.
As the process grinds on through committees, white papers, debates and summits, it may seem like a typically European phenomenon – long-winded, ponderous, bureaucratic, short on star performers and sex appeal. But it’s worth remembering that the western Europeans who have grown up watching this process are the first in many generations who haven’t taken time out to knock the hell out of each other in battle. And as recent events in former Yugoslavia have shown, Europe’s capacity for ethnic violence can never be completely discounted.
Slowly but surely, nations across Europe are in the process of uniting their destinies with former foes, of handing over strands of sovereignty previously held dearer than life itself. Long term, for many Europeans it will mean living under rules invented by other Europeans who don’t even speak the same language. This sort of prospect used to lead to fighting in Europe, but so far it has only sparked a war of words between the ‘Europhiles’ and the ‘Eurosceptics’ within countries.
With a fair wind, the early years of the next millennium should see the laborious but peaceful emergence of a true European Union, put together by committees rather than by combatants, but nevertheless a heroic achievement. What the late General de Gaulle said of his native France is even more applicable to Europe as a whole: ‘My friend, you can’t expect to unify overnight a country which boasts 257 different types of cheese.’
Déjà History
One of Europe’s big problems (and points of pride) is that the past is always getting in the way of the present and the future. For example, engineers trying to excavate tunnels for the city metro in Rome routinely came across ancient Roman relics – cue to stop digging and call in the archaeologists again. In London developers in the financial district have faced similar problems with buried Roman relics.
Even the idea of unifying Europe goes back a long way. On the eve of the first millennium, the year zero, the Romans were on their way to ruling an empire that would cover much of the territory now in the European Union. A thousand years later, the German-speaking area of Europe was engaged in a long-running attempt to put together a second empire – the would-be Holy Roman Empire. And after Napoleon’s short-lived conquest of Europe in the early 1800s, Hitler made his bid for the Third Reich (Third Empire), which crumbled in 1945.
On a less grand scale, many of the European social and workplace attitudes prevalent for much of this century are steeped in a sense of the past – the dynamics of left-wing/right-wing class politics and the efforts of workers to protect their interests. Workers’ ‘struggles’ are remembered as heroic, and even today, large numbers of Europeans are loath to give up hard-won privileges for the uncertain prospect of global next.
In short, Europeans’ history, their perception of history, and the legacies of history have all too often served to keep them apart and stuck in the past. But now, it seems that the grip of history is loosening across the whole Continent – although people in the Balkans might disagree on that point. New generations of Europeans have grown up amid peace and plenty, eating the same fast food, drinking the same soft drinks, driving the same cars and increasingly sharing the same tastes in music, movies and TV. These New Europeans display a mindset that breaks with the thinking of previous generations – much more focused on the here and now, on themselves and their own futures, much less interested in where they are from and more concerned with where they are going.
To paraphrase Francis Fukuyama, we may well be witnessing something akin to the end of history in Europe – or at least the beginning of the end of Europe’s obsession with history.
The Euro Nightmare
With the approach of the year 2000, computerized countries all over the world are facing the same Y2K ‘millennium bug’ problems. Computers in which dates were programmed as two digits rather than four will be completely thrown when 99 (of 1999) clicks over to 00 (of 2000).
But as Y2K fever heats up, Europe will add its own complication to the computer systems nightmare – a new currency, the euro, which is the flagship of an ambitious project of economic and monetary union. Banks and businesses in Europe currently have to deal with transactions between the fifteen currencies of the European Union, whose exchange rates constantly vary within fairly narrow bands. In order to simplify cross-border business in the future, Europe is going to phase in a single currency. The euro should make things much easier in the long term, but a lot more complicated in the short term. To quote from Peter Pan, the whole undertaking promises to be ‘an awfully big adventure’.
Europeans will be able to start using the euro on 1 January 1999, and for a three-year transition period it will be used in parallel with existing national currencies – the French franc, the German mark, etc. After that, it will be goodbye to the franc, the mark and all the other currencies that will cease to be legal tender in the summer of 2002. During the transition period, the euro will be the cross-rate hub – exchange rates will be calculated on the basis of each currency’s rate versus the euro, rather than directly between the currencies.
It’s not clear whether the European authorities were fully aware of the Y2K problem when they decided on the single European currency schedule. What is sure is that the timing is likely to keep legions of programmers very busy for a long time to come. Phasing in the euro will bring plenty of challenges. Currently, many companies need only deal with their national currencies, but even small, locally focused companies will have to phase in or switch to euro systems sooner or later. And the systems range from cash tills and computer keyboards with euro symbols all the way up to powerful number-crunching programmes handling corporate accounts. IBM calculates that the cost to companies doing business across the Continent will be in the region of US$175 billion. Fortunately, the banking industry is ahead of the pack in its preparations for the euro, which are thought to cost around US$100 million for big banks.
And the euro shift won’t touch only countries in the first wave of euro adopters. The European Union is the main trading partner for Britain, and while the British government is holding to a ‘watch from the wings’ line, British companies doing business with the mainland will probably find it pays to go euro sooner rather than later, since big Continental companies will be going for it. Business Week reports that Anglo-Dutch consumer products giant Unilever and many UK headquartered banks are among the companies that plan to start operating in euros at the birth of the new currency on 1 January. They’re sure to bring legions of suppliers and customers along with them.
Nonetheless, a survey by accounting firm Grant Thornton of London indicated that some 37 per cent of European companies haven’t even started thinking about the euro. It’s a fair bet that a considerably higher proportion of the cash-wielding public is even farther from incorporating the euro into their plans.
The Euro Dream
It shouldn’t take Europeans long to experience the benefits of the euro – which, among other things, will allow one to compare prices in different countries. The variations in price are sometimes big, and with no border controls between many EU countries, we can expect a sharp increase in cross-border shopping trips.
Despite the darkest suspicions of die-hard eurosceptics, the single currency isn’t being introduced to confuse people and make life more difficult. It’s part of a policy designed to remove the obstacles to doing business between European countries, creating a unified trading zone with a GDP to match that of the US. One likely consequence, posits the Economist, is that the euro could become a real alternative to the US dollar on a world scale, which would make it harder for the United States to run unlimited current-account deficits and to exercise unchallenged leadership of the international financial system.
Entry requests were reviewed at a summit meeting in May 1998, and the G-11 were officially named; Britain, Denmark and Sweden have chosen not to join the euro at this time – and Greece didn’t make the cut. At the same meeting Wim Duisenberg, a Dutchman, was named as head of the Central Bank, making him every bit as powerful as America’s Alan Greenspan, head of the Federal Reserve Bank.
In any event, focusing on the EMU entry criteria has spurred countries to greater budgetary sobriety across Europe and in turn helped drive interest rates down – all good news for investors. On the corporate front, the introduction of the euro should cut the cost of transacting cross-border business in Europe. Companies won’t have to give their banks the spread on foreign exchange transactions, and they won’t have to pay for currency hedges to lock in their prices. Moreover, the euro should stimulate cross-border efficiencies, allowing companies to expand, consolidate, restructure or relocate without regard to currency differences. No wonder investors are getting excited.
Banks, insurers and finance houses are expected to be among the first companies to go regional with cross-border product offerings in the single currency, which will make for greater consumer choice and mobility within Europe. Right now it’s theoretically possible to take out a mortgage in one currency to buy a property in another, but the foreign exchange risks are daunting for the average consumer. With the euro, that risk is eliminated. The increasing pace of preparations for Y2K and the euro are making software houses an irresistible investment opportunity, too.
With zero hour approaching, things are suddenly falling into place for the euro. Against expectations, European economies started picking up in 1998, after almost a decade of sluggish performance which threatened to scupper the currency’s introduction. What’s more, the Economist reports that European Commissioner for Monetary Affairs Yves-Thibault de Silguy thinks that the spending on preparations for the euro, coming on top of Y2K spending, will give Europe’s economies a further boost.
Borders, What Borders?
For cross-border travellers in Europe, things are just returning to where they were a century ago, when it was possible to wander across the Continent without a passport. Only recently have border controls between many European countries been dropped (under the EU’s Schengen agreement), but already some countries are wondering what they have let themselves in for.
Since October 1997, flights between Italy, France, Germany, the Benelux countries, Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Sweden and Finland have had domestic status, while land border controls are virtually nonexistent. The big worry now is that there are no secondary lines of defence to pick up illegal or undesirable immigrants – once they have made it into one of the countries, they can travel unimpeded to any of the others with little fear of being caught at border crossings.
Europeans and their governments are already daunted by the prospect of innocent economic migrants and asylum seekers turning up on their doorsteps from Africa and the near East. Many refugees in 1997 and 1998 were Iraqi or Turkish Kurds, who have been arriving in increasing numbers and applying for political asylum. EU countries are afraid things could get worse: recent years have seen sudden influxes from Albania and Bosnia; and the risk of mass migration from the countries of North Africa is ever present, particularly with Algeria virtually in a state of civil war.
But much more worrying are the activities of organized criminals who now make big money smuggling illegal immigrants, as well as the more traditional contraband of drugs, guns and money. According to Professor Ernesto Savona, director of Italy’s Transcrime research institute, the Albanian Mafia has now grown so powerful that it has already chased the Italian Mafia, once its patron and big brother, right out of the lucrative business of trafficking migrants. ‘Albanian-organized crime has its foot in the door, which is Italy, and this means people, prostitution and drugs.’1 It will be tough for EU countries to hold on to the Schengen ideal of free movement of people without more stringent immigration and asylum laws.
Expect Europe’s open-borders policy to come under a lot of pressure within the Schengen group, while the UK looks on smugly.
Immigration If you’re looking for a hot-button topic in Europe, immigration has long been a reliable choice and is likely to stay that way well into the next millennium. Recently deceased British politician Enoch Powell made his name thirty years ago with his notorious ‘rivers of blood’ speech on immigration, while in France the National Front party of Jean-Marie Le Pen now commands around 15.2 per cent of French votes on an anti-immigrant platform of ‘France for the French’. It’s all about culture (with a small c), jobs, and welfare. The presence of immigrants who are really, seriously different can create huge culture shock, especially when they are there in large numbers and form their own self-contained communities. For instance, Germany, Europe’s biggest receiver of immigrants, has around 7 million immigrants out of a population of 82 million.
Every European country has its unique immigrant population profile – which itself begs the question of how many generations it takes for immigrants to be classified as locals. The UK, France, Belgium and the Netherlands have people from their former colonies, Germany has Turks and Eastern Europeans, most northern European countries have people from southern Europe, and southern Europe, which used to lose migrants to the north, is now having to deal with the unaccustomed problem of absorbing immigrants from Africa and the Balkans. Apart from the smells of unfamiliar cooking and the sound of strange languages, the big fears are either that the immigrants will work, taking the jobs of local people and driving down pay levels, or that they won’t work but instead will live on benefit payments.
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