Just published: http://interactions.acm.org/
Cover Story: The Washing Machine That Ate My Sari - Mistakes in Cross-Cultural Design
(Apala Chavan, Douglas Gorney, Beena Prabhu, Sarit Arora)
The rise of emerging markets has fundamentally altered the global marketplace. Actually, it has created a global marketplace, a vast, wired network of manufacturers, programmers and designers who can be anywhere. But consumers and users are always local. And when it comes to developing successful products and services for these users, there is an almost infinite number of ways to get it wrong. Less than half of companies competing in emerging markets have been very successful in meeting their goals, according to one recent study. Bringing a new product to an emerging and possibly untapped market is seductive. But operational investments to enter the market are steep, and failure to launch can be very, very costly.
Peter Drucker said, "the business enterprise has two - and only two - basic functions: marketing and innovation." So success in an marketers and designers are the ones who must get emerging markets right. Designers need to gain a deep, almost tactile awareness of the culture and context of their target market, never letting the global threads of networks and supply chains wrap them in a cocoon. It's essential that they learn from the mistakes others have made in creating products for emerging markets.
This cover story, by Apala Chavan and her team at Human Factors International, highlights the often amusing but economically critical differences between cultures - and the challenges of producing products for the global marketplace.
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