Studies in Business and Economics

THE GLOCAL STRATEGY OF GLOBAL BRANDS

DUMITRESCU Luigi Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania VINEREAN Simona Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania

Abstract: A few years ago, globalization was the new paradigm in international business, however from a branding perspective it has lost its initial efficiency giving the fact that consumers do not seem to feel a connection anymore with the standardized products of global corporations, catered to them in mass marketing communication programs. With their centralized decision making, most companies simply stopped having a connection with the new global marketplace and neglected its emergence. Hence, the influence of local characteristics arose, and with that a new term that encapsulates the global and the local – glocal. “Glocalization” encourages companies to “think global, act local”, and they could do so by using the global brand, while localizing certain elements of that brand in order to suit a particular country. Keywords: global brands, globalization, glocal strategy, glocal marketing.

1. Introduction

In 1983, Theodore Levitt published a provocative Harvard Business Review article entitled “The Globalization of Markets”, in which he stated that a new global market, based on uniform products and services, had emerged. He asserted that large scale companies have stopped emphasizing on the customization of their offers to providing globally standardized products that are advanced, functional, reliable and low priced. He argued that informed customers were heading toward a “convergence of tastes”; thus corporations should exploit the “economics of simplicity” and he maintained that the future belonged to global corporations that did not cater to local differences in taste but, instead, adopted strategies that „operated as if the entire world (or major regions of it)