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A major technology company came to us with a brief that sounded straightforward enough:

Help us understand how to approach new markets around the world for our devices.

The work covered many countries and combined desk research, interviews, and fieldwork. The aim was not to become experts in one place, but to be able to look across many without losing the thread. To make that possible, we used a consistent structure for each country’s report that was pragmatic. The structure had to:

• scale across regions
• organize data so that countries can be compared side by side
• is legible to people who weren’t in the field
• and doesn’t collapse into anecdotes

Our initial structure made a country feel understandable. It explained how schooling worked, how technology showed up in classrooms, which platforms people used, and how devices circulated. It described the role of English, the influence of government policy, and the general shape of the technology landscape. A note on shopping in Thailand is a good example of this stage of the work.

In Thailand, cashless, electronic payments are everywhere, but they don’t resolve into a single system. At a 7-Eleven, you can use cash, cards, and mobile wallets—but not QR codes. Walk a few doors down to a small bakery in a popular mall and the situation reverses: QR codes are fine, mobile wallets are fine, but credit cards are not. Nothing about this is confusing once you know it. It simply means that “how people pay for things” depends less on national policy and more on where you’re standing. This was completely different to other places that had a standardized e-payment system, a nationalized bank, or primarily cash-only shopping habits.

As the reports accumulated we started to ask: how can we compare these markets meaningfully? At the time it felt appropriate to call a country a market. We worked with the data from the reports and originally tried to group regions by the prevalence of technology in these regions to try and compare them.

The first framework that made sense

Here is a very compelling framework that lets you compare South Korea, Brazil, and South Africa that doesn’t work.

Imagine a spectrum of how “prevalent” technology is in a country. On one end you have a country where tech is very prevalent, like South Korea: home of Samsung, LG, and the world’s fastest internet. Korean is the dominant language, yet there are dozens of keyboards to type in it on a phone. The country is connected through fast internet which is provided by ~3 giant conglomerates. Even the islands have tech solutions to bring data plans to the more remote corners. Every child has an expectation that a classroom will have smart devices and screens. Technology is diffuse which means that it is everywhere.

In the middle, tech becomes scattered unevenly across a country but the infrastructure is slowly expanding like in Brazil. There are hundreds of residential zones that span the gamut of urban and rural living that all shape the technological landscape. Within the most cosmopolitan parts you can get any brand of device and there are even some local brands that offer affordable, mid range phones and laptops. At the same time you have initiatives like the Motorola Project in 2020 which helped preserve the Nheengatu indigenous language by translating it for phones for the first time. There are thousands of small Internet Service Providers offering connectivity across the entire nation, usually set up by locals for locals to get internet in a specific location. The point is that technology is in a lot of places already and the programs to expand it are growing.

Finally you have the other side of the spectrum where technology is not prevalent: it is clustered in specific areas for specific reasons like how it is in South Africa. There are initiatives to bring more technology and internet and data throughout the country but those initiatives are still fresh. Many people do not shop online, nor have strong opinions about different brands of smartphones. Many schools don’t have running water let alone electricity.

Given this framework, when making a new device or software for a country the design logic follows easily:

• Advanced features for high tech prevalent regions
• Branding and adaptability for the middle 
• Robustness, affordability, and infrastructure for the regions with low tech prevalence 

On paper this was tidy and the clusters were so neat in how they aligned with familiar metrics.

When we went to map Japan onto this framework, it got weird because everything had a caveat. Are you talking about rural Japan, where a grandmother might still be using a flip phone, or Tokyo, where a grandmother might be using a flip phone ironically?

At first, these discrepancies felt manageable. We tried to add caveats, footnotes, and sub-segments yet each of these little exceptions created a crack in the framework.

India breaks the seams

By the time we reached India, we already suspected the framework was under strain. India is complex because of the size, diversity, language, education, income, gender, and region are all tightly entangled. The “technology prevalence” framework couldn’t describe a single city, let alone the entire country.

To try and incorporate India into our efforts, we came to a decision that English use and multilingualism is the clearest lens through which the entanglements become visible. Our research suggested that the best unit of measurement were communities who spoke differently rather than trying to consider the entire country as a whole. Who were the people who primarily spoke English and one of the other 19,200 dialects as a mother tongue? How were their lives different from the folks who didn’t speak English at all but were fluent in 3 or 4 other languages?

The next phase of fieldwork revealed what was missing before.

The research team went to a few select locations and began sitting in internet cafes, haggling for phones, doing stake outs at the small print shop/browsing station at the corner where people who go to complete government forms, and interviewing folks about when technology feels supportive and where it is lacking.

That data collection pointed us to the truth that glocalization experts acknowledge:

• borders define infrastructure, GDP, educational systems, national systems, etc.
• communities shape language, cultural practices, religion, and more.

Localized markets are the intersection that considers a community within a border because that actually shapes what is possible. Any framework that treats a country as a single market is doomed to failure. 

The way forward is to design from a deep understanding of communities that live within a certain border and how the specifics of that intersection affect what people care about and what they will pay attention to.

One can generate ideas that will conform to shopping norms, local infrastructure, and incorporate local sensibilities into the branding. The differentiator however is understanding the problems that locals face and knowing that key identity that people feel in everything they do. It’s these elements that define how a person interacts with the world around them.

That is what a glocalization framework should account for. How might we design something that isn’t just good, but it feels right?

How might we design for them?

The following are real people that live in different countries. The results of our work went on to try and capture the heart of how these folks lived their lives and what concerns them most. Rather than looking at national databases, we realized that the way to approach “a market” is by looking at what important needs are shared in a community.

He is a recent college grad who lives at home with his parents and siblings in Bangalore. His family is well supported by his father. He is familiar with technology from school, and although he only has a smartphone, he prides himself in finding a good price for devices at the local shops and helps his friends from getting a bad deal. The government has shut down internet services in his district during a protest a while ago for public safety, but this did not affect him drastically and was mostly just inconvenient. He is starting up a gig job soon which will be a stepping stone for him to learn all the programs that are used by the local government. He’ll apply when he is ready.

She was in secondary school when she had to drop out to start earning money. The big company in her hometown in South Africa, that hires everyone, is the mine and she has been working there for over 10 years now. The government and companies got criticized for being so male dominated, and in the recent turn-of-events she was promoted to supervisor and even appeared in a local paper. She began a local non-profit that improves job opportunities for women in mines and wishes to be a mentor to women co-workers who are intimidated by the industry. She appreciates things that can be reused, repaired, and shared since it’s not always possible for everyone to buy the things they want.

Recently divorced, he has thrown himself into his work as a professor and being a board member of the Silesian Culture Committee in Southern Poland. He likes to wander around different cafes where he takes over a table with his set up. Over coffee, he promotes Silesian folk art by digitizing and publishing his scans into online communities. Although he doesn’t like to really travel himself, he scours Amazon.pl, Amazon.de, and Alza.cz for gadgets he says he needs but if he were honest with himself, simply wants.

She is a planner in Taiwan who is nurturing both her young son and her parents who are about to retire. She speaks Hokkien fluently with her parents and set up a computer at home so that her son can learn it from an online course while she is away at work. Money is a little tight and she is working on her own online certification during her commutes (she knows where all the wifi spots are between her home and her office). Recent geopolitical events have made her distrust foreign companies and her preference is to buy local brands like Asus and Acer.

Identity and value

The approach that worked was one that helped surface the specifics of a community, not glaze over them by preferencing the large systems of a country. When we turned to other countries, we were able to center research and fieldwork around better questions: what they care about, what they’re afraid of, and what makes them feel like themselves. Then analysis determines which community differences are strategically meaningful.

To go global, the point isn’t to compel new markets but to belong in them.

Sophisticated Research.
Nuanced results.

617-807-0047

yuri@yzdesignworks.com