In recent months it's come to our attention some of the various digital businesses we've come into contact with, worked with or had some level of dicussion or exposure to their business. And of these businesses one thing has stuck out; businesses that shy away from engaging a global customer base eventually shrink or wither away.
No one wants to hear this, we don't delight in this finding, but it raises and confirms suspicions and trends over the years - that global players are going to affect your local market whether you like it or not. And no matter how strong a local brand you may be; market share, culturally entrenched, big bricks and mortar footprint and any other locally dominant position you may have – someone is coming for your customers.
This is the part where we get to the acceptance part of the article quickly. Quickly and effectively. No one person is to blame for this. But even as COVID-19 global-versus-local strains in supply chains and geopolitical tensions heated up, there remains a robust global market along with all the required technology to help it evolve very well thank you very much, as we emerge from isolation.
The New Local
Exactly how that emergence takes shape is neither here nor there. For local businesses this is not likely to change out-of-region competition. The ability to reach global (or at least national and outside "pure" local) is going to remain, along with the ever-present consumer desire to use brand, product selection, customer service, and price competitiveness as their driving motivations to find businesses that they want to deal with. In other words, even if some areas of the world end up competing less than they used to, competition will still be ever-present one way or the other.
Evidence of this has already been in play through the COVID-19 pandemic so far. Some businesses, initially at least partly shuttered for the same reasons as everyone else, began to flex their ECommerce muscles more (leaving the bricks and mortar part of their business largely darkened for now). To our pleasant semi-surprise - "semi" because their ecommerce platform was already capable of managing large-volume daily sales, we were just surprised as to how robust those sales were.
The New Global
Exactly how that emergence takes shape is neither here nor there. For local businesses this is not likely to change out-of-region competition. The ability to reach global (or at least national and outside "pure" local) is going to remain, along with the ever-present consumer desire to use brand, product selection, customer service, and price competitiveness as their driving motivations to find businesses that they want to deal with. In other words, even if some areas of the world end up competing less than they used to, competition will still be ever-present one way or the other.
