Global Marketing Requires a Very Local Attention: a Lesson from Vodafone’s Loss of Japan Unit Essay

Case Summary: This case is talk about the company, Vodafone KK. This company has good performance in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, and their subsidiary is joint ventures with United States. What a famous global company! However, Vodafone was failed in Japan. For example, their products in Japan were being dull and services were got worse. Because their products were not catch on the fashion, so Japanese who is tech-savvy didn’t like, and couldn’t satisfy them. Vodafone was just cared about that wanted to become global brand. They didn’t create some new products to attract the customer. Eventually, they failed. There had two competitors, NTT DoCoMo and KDDT. Because of this, they dispatched Bill Morrow to manage its Japan operation and modified its marketing strategy. As the result, their operation in Japan had getting better. And they hoped they could catch up their two rivals. Discussion Questions: 1. Why a firm would such as Vodafone need to have a global marketing strategy even thought its product development, as well as the rest of its marketing strategy, needs to be localizes for tech-savvy consumers in Japan? I thought they want to let everyone knew their brand. So they decided to develop their reputation first. At least, the company’s name wasn’t a unknown company. When they expand to other country, they need to and have to realize the country culture, and find the best strategy to develop in that country. 2. What alternative strategy might Vodafone have used to set a strong market position in Japan from the very beginning? In the beginning, Vodafone focused on building a global brand and cutting costs by producing large numbers of handsets to sell throughout the world . 3. What implications can you draw from Vodafone’s loss of its Japan unit with regard to global firms’ tapping into the convergence among global consumers? Not the Vodafone which is global company had met this kind of problem. As long as global company, might confront with. When the company expanded and developed their reputation, they all ignored some small details.