Brand and Product Decisions in Global

cHAPTER 10 • BRANd ANd PROducT dEcISIONS IN GLOBAL MARKETING
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To promote its Centrino wireless chip, Intel launched a global ad campaign that features different combinations of celebrities. In print, TV, and online ads, one of the celebrities sits on the lap of a mobile computer user. The celebrities—including comedian John Cleese, actress Lucy Liu, and skateboard king Tony Hawk—were chosen because they are widely recognized in key world markets.
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In the United States, Sony’s TV ads for its Bravia high-definition TVs encourage viewers to log onto the Internet and choose different endings. In Europe, the ads are completely different They feature bright images such as colored balls bouncing in slow motion. As Mike Fasulo, chief marketing officer at Sony Electronics, explains, Consumer adoption as well as awareness of high-definition products, including our line of Bravia televisions, differs dramatically from region to region.”
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Targeting the 300 million farmers in India who still use plows harnessed to oxen, John Deere engineers created a line of relatively inexpensive, no-frills tractors. The Deere team then realized that the same equipment could be marketed to hobby farmers and acreage owners in the United States—a segment that the company had previously overlooked.
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Marketers of premium American bourbon brands such as Wild Turkey have found that images of Delta blues music, New Orleans, and Route 66 appeal to upscale drinkers outside the United States. However, images that stress bourbon’s rustic, backwoods origins do not necessarily appeal to Americans. As Gary Regan, author of The Book of Bourbon, has noted, Europeans hate Americans when they think of them as being the policemen of the world, but they love Americans when they think about bluejeans and bourbon and ranches.”
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Likewise, Jägermeister schnapps is marketed differently indifferent key country markets. Chief executive Hasso Kaempfe believes that a diversity of images has been a key element in the success of Jägermeister outside of Germany, where the brown, herb-based concoction originated. In the United States, Jägermeister was discovered in the mid-1990s by the college crowd. In turn, Kaempfe’s marketing team has capitalized on the brand’s cult status by hiring “Jägerettes,” girls who pass out free samples the company’s popular T-shirts and orange banners are also distributed at rock concerts. By contrast, in Italy, the brand’s second-largest export market, Jäger- meister is considered an upmarket digestive to be consumed after dinner. In Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, where beer culture predominates, Jägermeister and other brands of schnapps have more traditional associations as a remedy for coughs and stomachaches, or as a morning after elixir.
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Jägermeister is an example of product transformation: The same physical product ends up serving a different function or use than that for which it was originally designed or created. In some cases, a particular country or regional environment will allow local managers a greater degree of creativity and risk taking when approaching the communication task.
Strategy 3: Product Adaptation–Communication Extension
A third approach to global product planning is to adapt the product to local use or preference conditions while extending, with minimal change, the basic home-market communications strategy or brand name. This third strategy option is known as product adaptation–communication

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