PaperCritique: Wang, C., He, J. and Barnes, B. (2017).
Brandmanagement and consumer experience in emerging markets: directions for futureresearch. International Marketing Review, 34(4), pp.458-462.
Summary:Thepaper aims towards the functioning of the business activities taking place inan emerging market, how the business affects the markets heterogeneity, the socio-politicalgovernance, inadequate infrastructure, chronic shortage of resources and the ethnicityand traditional values of the focused country. How the business is thriving globallyand locally. It also focuses on how a brand possesses its brand image.Moreover, it enlightens how a global brand and a local brand functions parallelto one another in the emerging market making long-term business profits. It alsoraises key questions as to how the business survival key skills are if theorganization is willing to go the extra mile for the customers as well as toincrease the sales.
Findings& Critique:Thearticle is enirely focuesd on brand management and the consumer experience inthe emerging markets like China. It highlights the categories of challengesfaced by global brands to engross it’s base in a different country, withdifferent cultural values and ethnicity. The article having a bent towards Chinese market makes it difficult for thereaders to gather knowledge about the other emerging markets around the samearea eg. India. As, it is a huge untapped market in a lot of fields and stilllacks in terms of trends and designs when compared to western markets. TheIndian market is currently opening up but still a large number of consumer arecynical with age old cultural values due to which for a global brand topenetrate on the Indian grounds it has to understand the consumer needs.
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The commonmistake commited by global brands is to categorize the Asian markets as ahomogeneous group, which can make one stratergy work in one country but not inanother. Moreover, there is only a verylimited understanding from the global brands towards the values and ethics of acertain market. The article only partially filled in the gaps as how a globallyrecognized brand needs to deal with all the local retailers and the consumer.Thearticle also highlights as to how global brands should collaborate with thelocal brands and the retailer to help them set a foot into the market, deliverthe consumers with the desired products and also help the brand to establishits base in the country. The articles talks about presenting a need foruniqueness, conformity and status satisfaction which in parallel affects the bandwagonluxury brand consumption opted by theglobal brands.Thearticle before reaching to its conclusion raised a lot of unambiguousquestions, and it keeps on jumping from one article to another, discusses aboutthe various effects and concepts (i.e.; Band Wagon Effect and Brand ResonanceConcept) that are used to justify the research.
The article tells us that themarket has reached at a saturation/maturity stage. It shares with us that thereis or will be a chronic shortage of the resources in the future, which pointstowards the inadequate infrastructure that a few countries already face.In conclusion, the research pertainstowards the building up of the basis of the framework in an appropriate manner.However, I find that the article was quite repetitive in certain areas and thereis a need of further research to be conducted to give an appropriate answers tothe questions raised in the article, also to fill the gaps. The article is morelike a literature review as all the references taken are just from journalarticles. There is no use of any proper research methodology.
The research also confirms the need of an appropriatebusiness plan for global as well as local brands, while entering the cross-culturedmarkets, which will gradually help them to understand their consumer, needs andenhance the consumer experience within the brand.Refrences:B. Holt, D., A. Quelch, J. and L. Taylor, E. (2004).
How Global BrandsCompete. How Global Brands Compete, p.9.Bhardwaj, V., Kumar, A.
and Kim, Y. (2010). Brand Analyses of U.S.
Global and Local Brands in India: The Case of Levi’s. Journal of GlobalMarketing, 23(1), pp.80-94.
Shukla, P., Singh, J. and Banerjee, M.
(2015). They are not all same:variations in Asian consumers’ value perceptions of luxury brands. MarketingLetters, 26(3), pp.265-278.The Economic Times.
(2018). India replaces China as top retaildestination in 2017: Study. online Available at:https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/services/retail/india-replaces-china-as-top-retail-destination-in-2017-study/articleshow/60766381.cmsAccessed 15 Jan.
2018.
