Advantages and Disadvantages of Adapting a Product to all Markets

Recently someone wanted to know more about the Advantages and Disadvantages of Adapting a Product to all Markets. The search engine, which he used, led him to my following article → International Product Policy – The Basic Product | Der Produktmanager.

Good question, I thought, there is someone interested in going global. However on the second view I began to question the propositions, which this person seems to have in mind. Consider for a moment, you were a small company, which plans to sell products abroad. In this situation you are certainly interested in information about the extend of global-readyness of your products. You further require information about the extend of localization and local adoption, which you offer.

However, in this situation, I think the question starts somewhere else, and does not leave you with a choice between advantages, or disadvantages. First of all, you need to understand what your product is, then you need to find out, what the customers in your target markets expect from it. Finally, you need to decide about a product design that supports global features,and local features. To a large extend, the customer needs define the need for adaption. Secondly your product design, and the  openness of your solution define the technical possibilities for these adaptions.

A further dimension is commercial – For the following reasons, it is normally not possible to start with one product in all markets:

• You do not have the capacity to gather market experiences in “all” markets
• You do not have the capacity to create a sales force and sales awareness in “all” markets at the same time

Normally the going global is a step-by-step approach. You start in few countries, and then enter other markets. In such situation, you simply do not have sufficient information to decide about the advantages/disadvantages right in the beginning.

I recommend the following stepwise approach:

• Define your target-markets carefully,
• Gather sufficient customer insight,
• Start by developing a product, which is focussed on these markets/needs
• Choose an open product architecture, to be able to extend your product lateron.
• Take care to install stable rollin processes, which allow you to gather intelligence globally.

Tags: Beispiele, English Content, Globalisierung, Internationalisierung, L10N-I18N-G11N | 2 Comments »