Myanmar is the flavour of the week as its capital city prepares to play host to the World Economic Forum East Asia 2013 from Wednesday to Friday. The usual crowd of global deep thinkers and high rollers will gather in Nay Pyi Daw to talk about challenges and opportunities and what a great time it is to be alive in Asia.
The WEF crowd, I’m sure, will be polite guests and won’t mention the woeful state of business and travel infrastructure in Myanmar, which is essentially trying to move from 1960 to 2020 in the next few years. You won’t find me looking down on Myanmar either; I know well enough what it’s like to grow up in a “poor” country with aspirations of catching up to the “developed” world.
These days, of course, it takes only a few weeks for tastes, trends or fads that originate in the “developed” world to make their way to places like Thailand, where a critical mass of consumers now exists to lap them up.
But sometimes the drumbeat about how great Asia is, and how consumer goods companies need to tap this huge market, sounds like empty marketing talk. A recent trip to Japan got me thinking about why some tastes catch on and others don’t.
Knowing how fond Thais are of things not-so-Thai, especially when it comes to snacks, I was pleasantly surprised to see how impressively Japanese companies combine local and international flavours to a new degree of perfection.
Sit in any decent restaurant and ask for pastries and you may feel as though you are in Paris. Ask for a waffle and the Japanese version could beat the Belgian one hands-down.
I call it the art of perfection, because when the Japanese do something, they need to do it perfectly.
Such dedication to perfection is limited to the Japanese alone, but it’s a fact that some high-end products get launched in Japan before they appear anywhere else in Asia, because their makers know the Japanese admire excellence.
Care for a Godiva green tea shake? You can get one in Tokyo and nowhere else.
Perhaps Godiva can be forgiven for it is catering to the high-end market. But what’s to stop a purveyor of pedestrian sweets in Thailand — say, Kit Kat or Glico — from offering something out of the ordinary? Who knows — a flavour developed in Thailand might even become a hit abroad?
Walk into a candy store in Japan and you may be overwhelmed by flavor choices: blueberry cheesecake, passionfruit, wasabi, strawberry, matcha and many more.
It was disheartening, then, when I boarded my Thai Airways flight and saw it was full of Kit Kat boxes. The candy store at Narita airport is full of cartons, each containing a dozen 10-bar boxes. The staff tell me the cartons sell out daily to homeward-bound Thais. (Confession: I picked up a carton for my office colleagues.)
If you’re a coffee drinker, you probably think that if you’ve seen one Starbucks, you’ve seen them all. But Starbucks in Tokyo is selling out of its tiramisu-flavoured coffee. After a taste I knew why and I longed for another cup, knowing I wouldn’t find one in Thailand. But the Starbucks shops at both the North and South terminals of the airport had run out.
Now that says a lot about the demand.
On the non-food front, I also wonder why it takes so long for some products to get to Thailand. Gillette, owned by Procter & Gamble, only introduced its Fusion razor blades in Thailand this quarter. What on earth were they thinking?
People like me have had to buy these products abroad and stock up, to the point that a visiting friend once asked me, “Do you have these blades in case of the apocalypse?”
Maybe P&G thinks that most Thai men don’t have a lot of facial hair, so a high-tech, multi-blade product won’t be in big demand. My question to them is, how much hairier is the average Singaporean, Malaysian, Japanese?
I guess I’ll just have to trust P&G’s market research. But surely a lot of companies could be doing a better job of figuring out what Asians want and are willing to pay for.
Glico has done a decent job in Thailand with larb-flavoured biscuit sticks, but then Glico is a multinational that is Asian and it should have a better sense of what Asians need. But P&G, Nestle, Starbucks and the larger multinationals may have to adapt their strategies if they want to really tap into what Asian flavour is all about.