Choose a country to compare with your own profile: Receive feedback on what this means to you in doing business and managing in that culture.
Follow further country-specific advice and information about what this means for business topics including marketing, meetings, negotiations, etc.
Stage 1
After testing this application to market their own country-specific products through the Internet in six countries (US, France, UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and Japan), THT reviewed some interesting feedback. The Americans and British asked for more critical incidents and self-tests; the Japanese requested that the system be made more specific to Japanese needs, finding it too Europe-centric; the French asked for more rigor in the way we presented the models of culture and its dimensions. We took all this advice seriously and adapted our Culture Compass OnLine to accommodate the feedback.
Stage 2
After the launch of the updated Culture Compass OnLine, the same participants were asked to give THT further feedback. Criticism on content changed toward criticism on process. The French liked the order: After completing the questionnaire the system gave feedback on the generic model of culture and the seven dimensions, following which you could test yourself through some cases (particular to your country of interest) in applied areas of negotiations, meetings, marketing, management, etc. The Americans had an objection about the flow of information. They suggested that the tool should start by showing some very concrete cases and critical incidents; only thereafter would the participants be willing to go for the "harder" stuff. The Japanese would rather leave the choice to the customer while the Germans would prefer to leave out the choice. The Dutch complained about increasing development costs...
Our consultants at THT were now facing a crucial dilemma: would they prefer to go for one global system with similar content or customize the application to local cultural needs? The technical people confirmed that technically speaking, the sky was the limit and lots of solutions were possible. In view of the above information, how would you have advised THT to develop the Culture Compass to the next level?
This case shows very clearly the first dilemma of the use of Internet: do we approach the client in a customized manner or do we benefit from economies of scale from having a universal system applied globally? If were to opt for the latter approach, the French might like it because of their love affair with deductive logic. They could start with a sound model and explore the specific applications in meetings, marketing, and management. The American learning style goes through a similar cycle but has a different starting point. They want to start with cases, to get a feel, and then see how it works in theory. This latter, inductive style is typical of American learning preferences, where you try to generalize from concrete cases; otherwise you might loose your audience too quickly. The Japanese would like to be able to give choice to the customer, while the Germans would rather go for the best system with not too many options.
That's all very well, but how can you best market this product through the Internet when in one company some (national) groups prefer this or the other style? Producing a system for every potential learning style in every country is prohibitive because of excessive development costs.
This dilemma is shown in Figure 8.4.
Figure 8.4: Customized versus global
We considered two approaches at THT. First of all the system could be modularized so that clients could pick and choose. But that wouldn't suffice and, in our terminology, this would only be a compromise solution.
So we accessed country-specific learning style preferences from our research database and followed the advice described above for specific nationalities. Another approach was to assess, as quickly as possible, the learning style of the individual user; we used a short, ten-item, online, interactive questionnaire. Then, depending on the assessment, the universal modules are offered in a particular sequence appropriate to that individual user. The beauty of internet technology is that it can guide the individual participant through the system in a unique way.
In either case, economies of scale were fully achieved in terms of software development, and the "local" user was given a particular structure of generalized modules. The ultimate dream we are currently exploring is one of a heuristic self-learning system that automatically adapts to a particular user's interests based on how they interact with the system from our collection of available standardized modules.
Dilemma 2: A broad Spectra of Customers versus Deep, Personalized Customer Relationships
The Internet obviously creates a very inexpensive way to reach millions if not billions of potential clients with the punch of one button or a single mouse click. You can do a "shotgun" broadcast to as many as possible (a.k.a. "spam"), broadly distributed across the field, or you can aim for just a few clients, with complex problems and specialized needs, who desire deep, ongoing relationships of service. The first strategy is cheap but rather superficial and may be problematic in other ways. The second strategy is intimate and personal but typically niche-oriented and expensive, because of the detailed attention necessary. The dilemma is illustrated in Figure 8.5.
Figure 8.5: Broad spectra versus deep relationships
Spam has become a battleground between ISPs, filtering out unwanted emails and pop-up messages, and spammers, using increasingly innovative approaches to break through the filters. A typical way of doing the latter is to auto-generate email subject lines at random so as to appear unique and thus not be recognized by the ISP's filter.
A reconciliation that cleverly addresses this tension is based on the concept of viral marketing (see, for example, Wilson, 2000). Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, and on to millions. Away from the Internet, viral marketing has been referred to as "word-of-mouth," "creating a buzz," "leveraging the media," and "network marketing." But on the Internet, for better or worse, it's called viral marketing.
The classic example of viral marketing was Hotmail.com, one of the first free web-based email services. The strategy was simple: Give away free email addresses and services, attach a simple directional tag at the bottom of every free message sent out and then stand back while people emailed their own networks of friends and associates. The people who saw the message then signed up for their own free email service, and propelled the message still wider, to ever-increasing circles of friends and associates. Like tiny waves spreading ever farther from a single pebble dropped into a pond, a carefully designed viral marketing strategy ripples outward extremely rapidly.
The genius of direct selling via the Internet is that you can reach an ever-increasing spectrum of customers and you can use the net to give personalized, detailed, information-rich services to them.
So long as you assume that distributors are necessary, you are stuck with the fact that existing channels are full and that no intermediary's brain is capacious enough to hold all the details and information about several rival products and their accompanying instructions. It is only when you let go of the whole idea of using distributors that the processes of direct selling via the Internet commends itself. The Internet is uniquely suited to information-rich products, which can be embedded in an ongoing community and woven around with dialogs on details and special opportunities. You can serve the whole spectrum of net users and you can go deeply into any specific problems. This dilemma is close to the dilemma or dimension of specific versus diffuse. You can reach down to each customer's problems in specific detail, and you can serve a diffuse array or spectrum.