Developing Next Generation SMS for Emerging Economies

We’ve been writing in previous blogs about the mistake that High Tech and Electronics (HT&E) companies would make if they fail to market to people in emerging economies. And we’ve written about how technology applications can overcome the difficulty of marketing to those audiences.

A story in the Wall Street Journal in October echoes these themes, discussing how Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard are “aggressively expanding their sales networks in China’s countryside, where over half of China’s population resides and broadband access is increasing.”

The story, “PC Makers Cultivate Buyers in Rural China,” notes that:

Though difficult to penetrate, China’s countryside is “probably still the world’s most promising market” in terms of the number of people “who’ve never owned a PC before, who would to like to own a PC and who have that capability,” says David Wolf, CEO of Wolf Group Asia, a Beijing-based marketing strategy firm.

So, the market in China and other places is huge and represents a green field of opportunity, possibly as many as four billion people worldwide. How can HT&E endeavor to capture this market?

We suggest that focusing on sales effectiveness will drive HT&E companies in the right direction. Sales effectiveness in our view comes about through enabling some tried and true operational processes through information technology:

o A unified collaborative workspace and corporate intranet that provides employees with an effective way to collaborate and form work teams, increase productivity and enable better information flows

o Integrated programs in a familiar environment that increase effectiveness among remote teams

o A secure working environment that prevents malevolence and intellectual property loss

We’ll talk more about improving these operational processes in future blogs. – Han Tiong Law