Giana M. Eckhardt
Executive Summary
Although much has been written about how to manage global brands, there has been relatively little written about how to manage local brands in a globalized marketplace. What has been written about local brands typically recommends that managers should capitalize on local cultural capital that global brands cannot match. However, when local brands are competing in a product category that consumers consider foreign, especially in an emerging market, such brands typically cannot leverage local cultural capital, and thus it is unclear how they should be positioned.
To investigate how to manage a local brand that is in such a position, Eckhardt examines a local pizza brand in rural India called Pizza Point. Currently, Pizza Point is capitalizing on the increased desire for Western foods, such as pizza, but it is trying to be affordable to its rural clientele and to offer more Indianized versions of pizza that appeal to the local palate.
The question is, Do consumers perceive the brand as local, foreign, or creolized? Eckhardt takes an interpretive approach to answering this question and conducts depth interviews with consumers and managers at Pizza Point. Three main themes emerge: The first, which demonstrates that the brand represents freedom from culinary tradition to the consumers, notes that this freedom from tradition stems from both the food itself and the nature of the social space within the restaurant. Although this freedom from tradition is a main driver of patronage, it is also one of the main factors contributing to the consumers not perceiving Pizza Point as a local brand. The second theme, which demonstrates that consumers interpret the brand as unaffordable and unpalatable, documents why consumers are not patronizing the restaurant as much as management had hoped. The third theme demonstrates that though management is attempting to transform the brand to become more local to combat consumer perceptions, the image that consumers have of the product category of pizza as foreign does not allow them to interpret the brand as local.
Eckhardt concludes that local brands in product categories that consumers in emerging markets consider foreign are highly constrained in how they can be managed; this conclusion goes against the accepted view that global brands are typically more constrained than local brands in the global marketplace. Local brand managers need to be aware of these constraints and manage their brands in close conjunction with overriding perceptions of their product category in the local market.
Biography
Giana M. Eckhardt is Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Australian Graduate School of Management. She received her bachelor’s degree in Marketing from the University of Connecticut and her doctoral degree in Marketing from the University of Minnesota. Her area of expertise is culture and consumption, and her particular interests focus on consumer behavior in Asia and global branding. Giana has published in Consumption, Markets and Culture, Journal of Macromarketing, Journal of International Marketing, and Asian Journal of Marketing, and she has contributed to volumes such as Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods for International Business and Review of Marketing Research. She is currently examining the link between culture and consumer ethics and is developing a framework for understanding panregional Asian branding.
Journal of International Marketing, Vol. 13, No. 4, December 2005
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