In one of the previous blog posts we have talked about how it can be tough to penetrate the Asian market and what mistakes can result from cultural misunderstandings. We are continuing our digital journey and today’s destination is Chinese business market.
In this part of the blog, we have talked a lot about importance of studying foreign culture and local customer´s mindset before expanding your business. Puma, Walmart, eBay, Groupon and many others have learned this lesson the hard way.
When Starbucks didn’t manage to conquer Italian market, it received a lot of media coverage on the subject of how to do (and not) International expansion. It was all good until this year Seattle chain of coffee bars announced it will come back with revised marketing strategy. This is why we decided that this case study deserves to be in the spotlight of our blog. After all, we devoted huge chunk of the blog to analyzing international marketing mistakes and Starbucks surely did some. Let’s briefly recap some of them.
The number of Vietnamese internet users has been rapidly increasing for the past decade, naturally, such an increase in internet users also brings with it an increase in e-commerce activities and digital marketing.
In our previous post we have discussed the fact that it can be sometimes challenging for Western companies to grasp Chinese cultural differences. These challenges are, however, not exclusive to China and can often arise even when you expand to a seemingly less mysterious country. This will be obvious after analyzing a story of an American electronics mega-store Best Buy and its failed attempt to enter the UK market.