When business is slow:
- Salesmen complain about the wrong products being developed
- Salesmen say Marketing is taking the wrong actions for lead generation
- Development blames Product Management for designing complex products with no demand requiring long development cycles.
- Development blames Company management for the high pressure to deliver the products faster.
- Quality Control is under such pressure of Management they don’t dare to stop the release of a product.
- Product Management reproaches Marketing for spending money on non effective events.
- Support is overwhelmed by the number of support call due to faulty products, incomplete manuals and the lacking Quality Control.
- Customer Service complains about the number of customer problems or guarantee.

Company management wants to take action and fires a few people in Sales and limits the budgets for Marketing.
They try hiring a few hot shots salesmen, but it could take ages before they close their first deals.
Meanwhile people get laid-off in Development, Administration, Customer service, HR, … the remaining people get too stressed because they have to take on the extra work and they are afraid to get fired too. The good people will seek interesting opportunities elsewhere and leave… until only the slackers remain.

When the market changes and business is growing:
- Salesmen close deals frequently and earn big commissions
- Marketing gets big budgets to spend for acquiring an even bigger market share
- Product management releases just the products needed as there is no pressure for more products
- Development has ample time and resources to create fine products
- Quality Control only releases fully tested products
- Support can easily handle the few and interesting support calls from happy customers
- Customer service is happy with the happy customers

Company Management gets more bonuses, stock options and cash in on their older stock options as the stock has increased in value.

Why should we blame our colleagues and co-workers in bad times?
When in good times the same people are all cheering together and the spirits are high.

Don’t blame it on sunshine
Don’t blame it on moonlight
Don’t blame it on good times
Blame it on the boogie

On Quora a question is asked: Which is better to work for, Google or Facebook?.
The answer to this question made the conclusion:
Google tends to value technology. Things are often done because they are technically hard or impressive. On most projects, the engineers make the calls.

Facebook values products and user experience, and designers tend to have a much larger impact.

This comparison forgets one company: Amazon – the bookstore, the Kindle system and Amazon Web Services.
Amazon has a diversified profitable business model selling products, services and values useful technology, whereas:
- Google is still a one trick pony: Adwords which they copied from Bill Gross from Idealab (Overture Services, Inc. – formerly Goto.com) who turned the idea and concept of keywords from Scott Banister into a business.

- Facebook has many people using the service but still it is uncertain if their business model is sustainable. The first sign of decay is apparent as teen move away from using Facebook.

Will Google come up with a new profitable business? Not just another Beta service with no business or another vehicle to sell Adwords?
Even Adam Rifkin of GigaOM declares that Google has no game !
Will Facebook be wiped out by the next social media or gaming portal, like what happened to MySpace?

Amazon generates profits from a growing number of successful multiple product lines like the Kindle and AWS.
AWS is even into Social Gaming as it provides the hosting that powers six to eight of the top ten Facebook games  like Zynga, Playfish and Playdom.

So who is the major force on the Internet ?
Amazon because it has different sustainable business and is able to reinvent itself on a regular basis with additional profitable businesses.

How sustainable is your business ?
Does your business have a back-up plan or alternative business ready to be executed ?

All is fine when you sign the deal:
- The goods or services
- The delivery date
- The payment terms
- …

Within the requested delay you supply the goods or services and promptly your company issues the invoice and has it send over to the customer by mail or email

Due date
As the due date is nearing you call up your contact and ask if the administration is processing your invoice. Of course your buyer confirms he will call the purchasing or accounting dept. to speed up the process.

When the due date of the invoice has passed by you ask the accountant or the accounts receivable clerk if he has received a payment from your client.
If not paid you call your customer again in the hope to the get them to make the payment. Your client informs you the administration of his company is processing your invoice.

The address is wrong: re-issue the invoice
A few weeks later the invoicing department or you receive a mail or email explaining the invoice was wrongly issued: the address of delivery was correct, but the invoice should be billed to a different address as the company headquarters or Registered Office is located on a different address. They still use the old building instead of the new facility.
How could you know as nobody ever told you.

The only solution is to re-issue the invoice with a different address and hope the customer will pay as soon as possible – but probably the customer will only pay within the agreed delay after receiving the new invoice.
Every few days or week your boss or even the CEO will ask about your unpaid invoice(s) until it becomes embarrassing.

There is nothing that you can do as the customer is king – especially when it comes to paying.
In any case this customer will not play this trick on you again (until he moves his Registered Office).

Managing your invoices, payment terms and payments are key for a successful business.

Cash flow
Using this method the customer doubles the payment terms and improves his cash flow.
The DSO (Days Sales Outstanding) simply doubles and your CFO or accountant gets nervous as his cash flow becomes a problem.

Sounds familiar to you ?

New product launch
When new products have been developed by the company corporate communications will issue a press release, marketing will promote and present the product with advertising and events to inform the potential customers to build awareness.

At the same time the salesmen need to learn the new product.
In most cases this is difficult to achieve as they are busy with contacting lead and selling the current products and following-up on their customers. That’s why boot camps for sales training were organized where they were cut off from their normal habitat. However the times of sales boot camps have passed by as people can continue to communicate with their customers and leads using cell and smart phones or wireless Internet.

Salesmen learn when:
Still salesmen will get a presentation and documentation in order to be trained on the new products.
A minority of the salesmen will learn quickly about the new products but the majority will have the wait and see attitude.

The best ways for getting a salesman to learn about the new products:
- When a lead or a customer asks about it or has a significant budget available.
- When a colleague earns a big commission
- When the margins on the new products are higher leading to higher commissions
- When the competitor steals his customers with a competing product
That’s when salesmen will learn the fastest.

Inciting salesmen
When launching a new product the best is when there is:
- a demand from the customers
- a big order giving a big commission to a colleague
- a competitor stealing customers
- a commission larger than average for the company

What incited or stimulated you to learn about a new product ?

The 40 hours week of work:
We (employees) probably work 40 hours a week – less all the coffee breaks and chit chat.
We do many things and have multiple experiences during this work week (even boring time consuming meetings).
To be fair: the commuting time to work needs to be added to these 40 hours.

During these 40 business hours we do our work, run the business and gain our income.

The 40 hours weekend:
A weekend lasts a little over 60 hours: from Friday 5 pm to Monday 7pm.
The 3 nights of sleep are consuming about 18 to 21 hours.
This making the amount of time available during a weekend about the same as the entire work week: 40 hours.

During this free time we spend most of our disposable income (or what’s left over after mortgage and utility bills).

Work vs weekend
Seems we have as much time to earn or income as we have time to spend our money.

So what did you do during:
- Last work week ?
- Last weekend ?
Anything significant ? Or just wasting time ?

People have a lot of time to themselves but seem to be more active or effective during business hours.
Make sure you spend your spare-time efficiently and well.
Life is too short to waste your time.

Remarks:
- Many entrepreneurs work almost the entire week by combining the two: working more than the 40 hours.
- The Internet and online businesses are active 24 / 7.

The common enemy
Throughout history leaders have used threat, danger or evil of an enemy in order to unify the forces of a country or organization. This has been used to fight anything from communism to terrorism.

The same method can be applied in order to build a team: define a common enemy and the employees will all line up.
When people have a common enemy they will stick more together and forget about their problems and differences with other team members as the enemy needs to be handled first. The enemy becomes the prime problem that needs to be solved.
The best is if you can nail down the common enemy to one organization representing all evil.

Finding the common enemy
The problem for the leader is finding the enemy who is accepted by all members of the team.
- All team members need to accept the common enemy else two groups will emerge in your team: those who follow you and those who object.
- Your organization or company needs to represent a positive feeling, whereas the enemy needs to include something negative.

In sales or marketing your nearest competitor can be used as the enemy.
Or even a different technology can suit as the enemy if you can make believe or can proof your technology is more advanced, uses fair trade or is ecological less polluting. The technology your company uses builds the team and differentiates them from the salesmen of the competitors.

Going out of business is also a common enemy but that will engage less as it is too omnipresent and very negative.

Advocates
The team building can be extended to your customers who can become your advocates.
Using a common enemy to extend the team beyond the company.
This what Apple is executing with every product they launch which they started with the ‘Big Brother Commercial’ in 1984 where the common enemy was IBM.
Since then the Apple products have been marketed as superior, having higher quality at a premium price and giving a better lifestyle compared to all others.
This has brought Apple many advocates (the so called ‘Apple Fan-Boys’)

Who or what is the common enemy of your company ?

Is the CEO serious ?
When the CEO, COO or VP Sales explains during a meeting their website is completely out of date and should be reviewed and renewed, we always wonder how serious they are about their business as they present the company to the world with products they no longer carry or services they have stopped providing.
Are they taking their job seriously ?

Would this CEO, COO or VP Sales handout their business cards with an old telephone number or an error in the address or email address ? Probably not.

Website relevancy important for executive compensation
Still they care less about the no longer relevant website, that gets visited by potential leads, customers, vendors / suppliers and financial institutions, than about their business cards.

The website will be visited by and will communicate to more people than the CEO, COO or VP Sales will ever speak to or meet.
All of these website visitors will get the wrong impression and will make the wrong conclusions and decisions. This will have a bigger impact than a business card with an error.
The status and being up-to-date of the website should be one of the priorities for the CEO, the COO and the VP Sales.
Hence the status of the website should relate to the executive compensation as it is the window of the company to world.

Is your website up-to-date ?

Business model perception: Google vs Amazon

The perception people have of your business model is most important as changing is almost impossible.

Google is free
Google is perceived as a free Internet service supported by advertising. Any other business model like paying for services they offer or software on an appliance are unlikely to become an instant success or will take long to succeed.
Whenever Google launches or promotes a paid service (Google Apps), people and companies abstain as they have perception of free services.
Google tries to lure in users or businesses by offering a free service of Google Apps (Freemium), but still the hurdle of paying remains.

Amazon is paying
People are used to pay for goods and services for Amazon. Purchasing books from Amazon with a credit card was from day one. It seems evident getting your credit card out when visiting any of their website.
When Amazon launched Amazon Web Services (AWS) for storage and cloud computing nobody grumbled about paying for these services.

The right perception from day one

If you going into business make sure the perception is correct from day one as changing later will only cost time, effort and money and will waste a lot of energy unnecessary.

- If you aim to supply quality products or services make sure you provide quality from day one.
- If you aim to have a premium pricing for exclusivity make sure you are exclusive at start.
- If you aim to address youngsters make sure your products and services target youngsters.

Changing the perception people have is utmost difficult to do and you probably have to lure people in order to get your customers.

Investigate the perception

You need to investigate in order to know what exactly the perception of your customers and potential customers is about your company.
This you need to keep in mind when designing and developing the next generation of products.
Launching a product that not matches the perception will only cost you money for marketing and promotion. Mostly wasted money as you will be trying to convince people to change their perception.

Whereas you put product on the market matching the perception less marketing is needed and advertising can limit itself by focusing on the benefits and features.

What perception have your customers of your company ?

The niche market expands
As a niche player you have a good business with reasonable margins and a slow sustainable growth.
As your market grows your revenue increases too.
The world seems perfect and the future is bright.

However your niche is becoming less a niche and your market gets a broader appeal and interest from more customers.
More competition will move into the market.
Soon even large corporations will acquire competitors or create their own products or solutions.

Competing with large corporations: not done
Competing with the large competitors is a battle that normally is won by the large corporations as they have the capability to scale in marketing, sales, manufacturing, logistics and distribution supported by their brand name.

Seldom has the niche player actually stayed leader in his market: only if he can achieve scalability in order to equal to the major corporations and coping with the growth of his organization.

At the moment the multinationals have overtaken the market, it is too late for any niche player to shift focus to another market as:
- the margins have become minimal due to the competition
- market share has decreased
- net income has become less
- money is drying up
Hence less cash available to invest in order to start-up in a new niche market.

The curse of the niche player: a market nomad
Niche players should start to plan to move on to a different niche market as soon the market opens up and new competitors enter the market.

At that moment the money gained should be invested in order to create new products or offerings and to develop the niche market.

Niche players should be nomads moving from one niche market to another every time the market expands significantly.
The curse of the niche players is being a nomad. A market nomad.

If you are working for a niche player, in what stage is your niche market ?
Is it time to look for a new niche market ?

Joint venture culture clash

When the COO of the American company asked for sales estimations to the Direktor Vertrieb (Sales manager) of the German company, he expected a spreadsheet with numbers.
Instead the Direktor Vertrieb gave sales estimations without any calculations.
The COO then asked where he got the numbers, the German replied “Aus dem Bauch” (just his best guess based on his gut feeling).

The problem is both people were working for companies that had joined forces in a Joint Venture.
The American COO almost went nuts. For him it was impossible to run a company based upon gut feeling. This was unheard of in a time of information systems, ERP and spreadsheets.

The rational American COO could demand for forecasts based upon calculations in a spreadsheet, but he had no power over the German Sales manager to oblige him.

The German Sales manager had no intention to go through all the required calculations as he was sure of his best guess. Moreover he had too much pride to succumb to the demands of the American COO.

Driven by his pride and prejudice the COO went out to calculate a myriad of spreadsheets as it was important for him to know and to have numbers based on assumptions, input from analysts and salesmen.
The numbers of the COO were used to plan the production.

About a year later it became clear the “Aus dem Bauch” numbers were near the realized sales, whereas the numbers produced by the COO were far off.

The German Sales manager had a decade experience in selling similar products into the market, whereas the COO not.
Experience counts more than all the number that can be assembled and mixed into the most complex calculations that are based upon certain assumptions.

Joint venture sufferings and oppositions

A joint venture is an organization that is difficult to manage as almost every aspect or habit of both companies can cause a clash that can make the joint venture fail.
Pride and prejudice are one of the main factors of failure.

When two cultures or company cultures meet many problems arise causing oppositions and sufferings at both sides. This is inevitable.
The sufferings and oppositions are the life and operations of any joint venture company.

Did you ever survived a joint venture ?

In our opinion there are two ways to use social media:
- Hit and run
- Invest and leverage

Hit social media and run

Think social media but act business wise
You consider the occasional social media impacts on your business as short term opportunities. You just take these social media efforts and successes for granted in order to get a quick profit or temporary improvement of your operating income.
Your social media efforts are not the main part of your long term marketing plan or business plan.

In the end your business goals using proven marketing methods are more important than the uncertain effects of social media.
Social media marketing is chaos compared to business where order and accountability rule.
In this case you probably prefer interruption marketing (advertising) as it more organized, systematic and proven.

Invest and leverage social media

Think business, but act social media
You consider and care for your business, but your actions are geared towards social media as these can have a bigger impact on your business in the long run.
Your goal is to leverage the effects of your social media efforts for your business. This will require investing heavily and systematically in social media marketing as it is quite different than the more organized and straightforward methods of interruption marketing.
The larger uncertainty makes the risk larger.

Your real roots for marketing are in the social media as it is your main focus.
The sustainable benefit, thanks to your social marketing efforts, in the long run is more important than a quick business profit.
However due to the uncertainty and outcome of social media marketing the investment to be made in time, creativity and efforts can be quite important before any significant return is noticed.

Social media marketing: company, management and business dependent

Both alternatives have a reason to exist as both can bring success.
The decision to be made is related to the type of company or the company management or the business.
There is no single rule and no good or bad in using social media marketing or not.
If you want to avoid frustration and annoyance then stay away from social media marketing due to the uncertainty and the chaos.

If you like risks, have or are able to create interesting content and have time, then you can aim to leverage your social marketing efforts.

Even if social media marketing seems the most cost effective at first, there is more investment needed to be successful (or you have beginners luck).
These investments need to be increased by the probability of being unsuccessful over a long time.

What do you do?
Think social media but act business ?
Or
Think business but act social media ?

When sales revenue is seriously under budget, the company management can blame it on many factors:
- Economic: recession
- Competitors: slashing prices
- Salesmen: not performing – not achieving
- Marketing: the wrong campaigns, the wrong events
- Management: this is the most unlikely to do
in order to explain to the Board of Directors.
Still in most cases the Board of Directors will require a fast fix.

The real question is question: how to solve the problem?

Salesmen related

- Fire a few salesmen
This will give shock to the other salesmen, but will it motivate ?
- Hire more salesmen
Could work but that will be costly and the geographies or product lines need to be reorganized – costing time
- Replace a few salesmen
Firing salesmen and hiring new ones will take time.
Some leads and prospects will be lost.
It takes at least 6 months for a newbie to know how to sell in this B2B.
- Demand to increase the cold calling
If your sales cycle is short: it might help. If the sales cycle is long: no cure.
If your customers are hard to influence, this will be not a solution.
The valuable time of salesmen is wasted by waiting on the telephone and dialing.
- Call on existing customers
As these companies have previously decided to buy from you it is likely there will be additional sales.
- Up-sell or cross-sell with your existing customers
If you don’t try you will never know.
If your salesmen didn’t bother previously, then this could generate marginally more sales.
- Shorten sales cycle
Sales cycle can be shortened by more calls and more meetings, but are your customers deciding more quickly ?
- Higher commissions
Salesmen will make more efforts and spend more time on selling.

Marketing actions

- Start several email campaigns
Could help, but will not change revenue overnight as email campaigns are marketing tools to generate leads.
- Telemarketing
This is a marketing effort that can generate leads.
- Setup an event for customers, leads, prospects and partners
Might work but depends again on your sales cycle length.
- Look on your website for more leads
Use a web service that reveals the company name of the website visitors and their interest: generating more leads

Management decisions

- Give additional discounts
This will bring in additional sales as there are always people and companies looking for bargains.
Still you need to close more deals than before due to the discount.
- Higher quantity discounts
Works for a short time span, as your customers stock up on products they will buy less next quarter.
- Increase your prices
Then you need to close the same number of deals in order to increase revenue.
You have to close the same number of deals.
And hope your customers aren’t switching to your competitors.
- The carrot
Give away an additional service or item for free from a certain level of order value.
- Promote a sleepy product sitting in your inventory at rock bottom prices
As the products have been paid, keeping them in your inventory will only cost you more interest
- Partnerships
Signing a few promising partnerships has potential but will consume time before any result.
- Bundle your products with partner products
This sure will generate interest as you address the market differently.
However his will require a marketing campaign. Thus not an immediate solution.
- Online sales:  setting-up an online shop in the hope to sell direct
Selling online can be direct and fast.
It takes probably much longer before your online shop is findable on Google, Bing or Yahoo! than you average sales cycle.
Your distributors and resellers will get upset and refuse to sell your products.

Financial possibility

- Prepayment or payment on delivery
Instead of needing to wait 60 to 120 days for your payment, ask for immediate payment.
This will not increase your revenue, but sure will help your cash flow. The question is what will you give in return ?
More services ? Less maintenance fees ?

What do you do to reach the budget if you are lagging significantly behind ?
Or you don’t care as it is only a budget.

Collecting brings objects overload – information overload

People like to collect objects
In most cases collectionners gather so much stuff the number of products becomes overwhelming. The objects collected aren’t used.

Companies like to collect data
Similarly companies like to register data about their events, statuses, customers and leads. Meticulously every piece of data has to be written down or entered in a software system for one reason or another.
Production data, customer data, lead data, product data, employee data, …
Companies collect so much data that they have not enough analysts to use or to analyze all the numbers.

Large companies can buy expert systems to crunch the numbers according to pre-programmed rules and could find trends or anomalies. Pre-programmed rules will only generate findings within the rules defined. These systems will not indicate new trends or disruptions.

The collecting problems
Problems with collected items are:
- The freshness
- Too much of the same
- No use but collecting itself

Further problems with data are:
- The freshness
- The level of detail over time
- The method for measuring should remain the same
These problems will make analyzes and conclusions even more difficult to achieve.

Still most of all the registered data rests useless just like the objects in a collection.

The usefulness of data

The usefulness of all this registered data becomes questionable as the projections into the future are based upon:
- A subset of all of the data
- An extrapolation of the current data

People in companies seem to have a tendency to register all information too, just like collectionners without any real purpose or benefit.

The Marketing data dilemma

Departments like production or human resources have the advantage of having all data within their own department.
Marketing has the additional problem of requiring data from many different sources internally and externally:
- Internally: website analytics, campaign data, event data, leads generated, appointments made, invoices printed, revenue.
- Externally: market data, competitor data, macro economic data
The marketing department has to cope with the problem of collecting and aggregating the data, which makes the analysis even more difficult due to the inconsistency and the overload of the data.

Of course if a company doesn’t register and measure, it will know less or very little.
The question is if all this collected data really needs to be registered.
What is the cost of all this registration and keeping the files?

What shouldn’t be collected in your company ?

The good intentions of a partnership

Partnerships are very loose agreements.
Even if there is a commitment from both and if there is a legally binding document there are no efforts that can be imposed from one party to another.

One or more people from each company agree to partner for presenting a combined solution in order to develop the market. In most cases each of the parties involved see a benefit in this partnership.
In some cases the partnership manager was eager to sign another partnership as his bonus is depending on the number of partnerships signed each quarter.

The reality business test

After the great announcement and enthusiasm with the press conference, press release and interviews, the partnerships needs to be tested to the real world: the real business case.
When a partnership comes to the execution phase other people become involved, who might not see or perceive the same benefit or any benefit for this collaboration: marketing and sales.

Marketing in partnership

Marketing needs to promote a solution that is different from the current family of solutions. Different product – hence different market or market approach.
Marketing needs to have the required budget to afford spending time and money on the combined solution.
At the same time the marketing departments of each of the partners need to agree about method reach, spending amounts, channels used, media used, type of advertising.
Promoting the partnership solution needs collaboration of marketing having different opinions of methods used and budgets.
Partnerships overlook the fact the marketign departments need to co-operate and collaborate in order to spend the money efficiently.
Who decides what ?

Sales in partnership

The salesmen might not be interested as:
- Their bonus system or commission system doesn’t include the partnership offering or doesn’t include adequately the combined solution.
- He doesn’t find it interesting
- Has the perception his market is not ready for the new solution

Salesmen could just consider the partnership as a waste of time as it requires to:
- Learning about the combined solution
- Explaining the benefits to the customers: more cumbersome than without partnership
- Sell the solution of the partner: what about the commission on that solution?
- Take the risk of selling third party products or solutions: unknown territory = risky business
- Manage the problems of the implementation or deployment of the combined solution
- Have a support team that supports the combined product as one

All this while they could have been generating leads and sell the company products or solutions having clearly defined targets and commissions in a known market.

Sales can make efforts to address the market and find potential customers, but once into the negotiation phase, the salesman of the partnership will step in and can deviate and steer away the deal away from the combined product.
The salesmen need to trust each other for not stealing the leads and customers.

Partnerships prerequisites

Although many partnerships start with good intentions, most will fail during the execution.
Make sure the combined solution or partnership:
- Has a significant potential market
- Can be supported by both marketing departments
- Agrees on the marketing budgets upfront
- Is part of the commission scheme for sales
- Makes life of the salesmen easier not more complex
- Is fully tested and supported in order not to waste time of the salesman
- Has build-in systems to avoid lead and customer stealing

It is rare that a partnership actually works out for both parties involved as most companies see a partnership a method to sell their products or solutions through the channels of the partner with or without the partners’ products or solutions.
That’s why most partnerships are a fraud as the goal is not to sell the combined product but more of their own getting easy access to the customers and lead generation of the partner company.

How many of your partnerships have ever been successful ?

If a business is emerging the complete service is supplied by one company.
From conception, design, development, production, marketing, selling, invoicing and support.

Once the business becomes mature the functions are segregated and performed by different companies:
- The imaginators: define the products or services – conception
- The designers: give the looks, functionality of products
- The developers: create the products
- The industrializors: take a product into production
- The manufacturers: producing the products
- The marketers: bringing a product to the market and let the market know
- The lead generators: call centers or email marketing services generating leads
- The sales: selling and closing deals
- The after sales: the after sales service

The company defines and creates the new products.
The manufacturing is done by a subcontractor in Asia.
The company promotes the products using marketing.
Distributors import the products into their country.
Resellers sell the products to shops, who on their term sell it to end-users.

Sales is split up between those who sell from one business to another (B2B) and those who actually sell to the end-users (B2C or B2B).
Hence the change of nature of sales: from really selling to customer over to partnerships and business development. This also changes the nature of the negotiations.

Blogging from cottage industry to real business

For example the business of blogging is still not mature as one man will still imagine and write the blog posts, edit it, then market and distribute it in order to collect money in the end (online advertising or generate interest for their business)

The first signs of evolution are present as major blog sites (Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, Mashable!, Endgadget) are appearing who employ several writers and editors, but also marketers and people selling advertising.

Just like newspapers the blogs are becoming content companies having writers under contract. History repeats itself.

Signs of very matured business

In all business specialization comes into existence once the business matures.

Only if the market is very matured and the products have become almost a commodity, then the top 3-5 large brands start to skip intermediate steps of distribution and reselling as they:
- Use local self-employed representatives as a first step
- Open local offices for distributing to resellers or customers
- Open shops in the main streets (like Apple, Nokia, Zara, H&M).

in this case the big brand name are facing the end-users again giving them the benefit of direct customer contact and feedback.
But also all the hassle of going local (employees) and the problems of logistics.

The joy in emerging business

If you are in an emerging business, you still can have the joy and all the problems of:
- Direct customer contact
- Complete control over the total chain of design , production to distribution and sales.

How mature is your business?
Have the big brands already local presence?