Breakout Strategies for Emerging Markets: Business and Marketing Tactics for Achieving Growth

3. Designing Cultural Fusion

Functional fusion creates acceptability for products and services by adapting for better functionality. However, this is just a necessary, but not sufficient, condition. To win over hearts, minds, and wallets, you also need to pay attention to the psychological aspects of creating acceptability. You can achieve this by becoming sensitive to a host of factors that are ingrained in the local cultures of the people in emerging markets and in their communities at large. Culture is understood as a programming of the mind that distinguishes one group of people from another (Hofstede, Hofstede, and Minkov 1991). Thus, cultures collectively hold certain values that then influence common perceptions of actions, emotions, images, ...