All Strategy is Local

In the September issue of Harvard Business Review, Bruce Greenwald and Judd Kahn wrote an excellent article entitled All Strategy is Local. The essence of their article is that the more local the company’s strategies are, the better the execution tends to be.

In a competitive environment described as increasingly “flat” with access to most markets by low cost foreign competitors, the one advantage local competitors have is their ability to better understand, and hence serve, local customer needs. When faced with foreign price competition, remember...

Those non-WALMART buyers have other needs to be satisfied. The locally focused competitor is more likely to understand the need priority of their customer and be flexible enough to respond to those needs.

According to Greenwald and Kahn:

“For all the talk of the convergence of global consumer demand, separate local environments are still characterized , in both obvious and subtle ways, by different tastes, different government rules, different business practices, and different cultural norms”.

Hence, all strategy is local. The more we segment our markets to meet these local differentiated needs, the greater chance we have of surviving foreign price competition.