HookThe Big Mac you cannot buy in India
McDonald's arrived in India in 1996 and did something it had done nowhere else: it took its signature product off the menu. In a country where most consumers do not eat beef — and a large minority eat no meat at all — the Big Mac would have been commercial self-harm. Instead came the Chicken Maharaja Mac, the McAloo Tikki potato burger at pocket-money prices, a menu that is roughly half vegetarian, and kitchens physically split so vegetarian food never touches meat. The golden arches, the service system and the supply-chain discipline stayed identical to everywhere else. Everything the customer actually tastes was rebuilt for India.
That is glocalisation — think global, act local — and it is the central idea of 4.3. Underneath every case in this section sits a dial, not a switch: how much should a global business standardise, and how much should it adapt? Standardise too much and you are selling beef in Delhi; adapt too much and you lose the scale economies and brand consistency that made you global in the first place. This section teaches you where to set the dial — and walks through the famous disasters that follow when firms guess.
ModelGlobal strategy against glocalisation — the standardise/adapt dial
A pure global marketing strategy treats the world as one market: one product, one brand, one campaign. The case for it is cost and coherence — every adaptation multiplies production runs, packaging variants and creative work — and the academic godfather of the view, Theodore Levitt, argued back in 1983 that technology was homogenising tastes worldwide. Coca-Cola's 2016 'Taste the Feeling' campaign folded its sub-brands into a single global message for exactly these reasons.
Glocalisation keeps the global platform — brand, systems, supply chain — and adapts the surface to local demand. McDonald's is the archetype. So is Nestlé's KitKat in Japan: the name happens to echo kitto katsu, 'you will surely win', which turned the bar into a good-luck gift for students before exams. Nestlé leaned in, releasing well over 300 Japanese flavours since 2000 — matcha, sake, regional souvenir editions — and a British four-finger biscuit became a Japanese cultural object.
Neither pole wins in general; the dial sits in a different place for every product. That is the analysis examiners want: which elements are standardised, which are adapted, and why.
ModelEthnocentric, polycentric, geocentric
The spec names three approaches, and questions often ask you to identify which one a business is using. Ethnocentric (domestic): the home product is sold abroad unchanged, on the assumption that what works at home works everywhere. It is cheap and protects brand consistency — Apple sells essentially the same iPhone line worldwide — but it is blind to local taste, and history is littered with its failures. Polycentric (international): each market is treated as its own domestic market, with tailored products and locally run campaigns — McDonald's India operates almost as an Indian food company. Maximum relevance, minimum scale economies. Geocentric (mixed): the deliberate hybrid — a global platform with local adaptation — which is glocalisation formalised. Think of KitKat's global brand carrying Japanese flavours, or Unilever selling the same shampoo technology in £3 bottles in Britain and single-use sachets across South Asia.
Do not treat these as a league table with geocentric always 'best'. An ethnocentric approach is arguably correct for luxury: Rolex and Burberry sell sameness — a watch or trench coat that is identical in Tokyo and Toronto is the point. The right approach follows the product and the customer, and saying so is the evaluation the mark scheme pays for.
MechanismAdapting the 4Ps for a global market
Work the mix systematically. Product: reformulate for taste, regulation and climate — spice levels, sweetness, pack sizes; Cadbury sells chocolate in India in small formats engineered for both the heat and the price point. Price: match local purchasing power, not a currency conversion — which often means designing the product backwards from a target price, as the worked example shows. Place: distribution differs radically — India's millions of tiny kirana stores against Britain's supermarket oligopoly; in China, where a huge share of retail happens online, launching means Tmall and Douyin storefronts, not shelf space. Promotion: media habits, festivals and idiom all shift — Diwali gifting campaigns in India, key-opinion-leader livestreams in China, and slogans checked by native speakers (the final block shows what happens otherwise).
Price-point marketing, reverse-engineered. Mondelez sells Cadbury Dairy Milk in India at fixed price points such as ₹5 and ₹10 (roughly 5p and 10p), because chocolate there is a pocket-money purchase. Suppose the target is a ₹10 pack, GST on chocolate is 18%, the retailer takes a 15% margin and the distributor 10%. Work backwards: net of GST, ₹10 ÷ 1.18 = ₹8.47; after the retailer's 15%, ₹8.47 × 0.85 = ₹7.20; after the distributor's 10%, ₹7.20 × 0.90 = ₹6.48. Everything — chocolate, wrapper, factory cost and Mondelez's own margin — must fit inside ₹6.48 per pack, which is why the pack shrinks to a few pieces rather than the price rising. The price is fixed; the product is the variable. That is adaptation of the marketing mix in one calculation.
CaseGlobal niche markets — small everywhere, big overall
Cultural diversity cuts both ways: people across the globe differ, but groups within every country share intense interests — cyclists, tabletop gamers, gin obsessives — and a global niche aggregates them across borders. The features to quote: customers with distinct, strong preferences; premium prices and high margins; low volume per country but meaningful volume worldwide; and community — customers who talk to each other internationally and do much of the marketing for free.
Britain is unusually good at these. Brompton builds folding bicycles in Greenford, west London — around 90,000 a year, roughly three-quarters exported to more than 40 countries, with Japan and South Korea among its strongest markets. Games Workshop sells Warhammer miniatures from Nottingham to a worldwide tribe of hobbyists; it entered the FTSE 100 in December 2024 and has agreed a deal with Amazon to adapt Warhammer 40,000 for the screen. Adapting the mix for a niche is distinctive: you barely touch the product, because authenticity is what the niche is buying — you adapt place and promotion instead: local dealers, local-language community management, region-specific events. Dilute the product to chase the mainstream, and the niche that made you leaves.
MechanismCultural and social landmines
The spec's final leaf is a catalogue of expensive mistakes, and examiners love them as application material. Language and translation: when KFC opened in Beijing in 1987, its slogan 'finger-lickin' good' was famously rendered into Mandarin as something close to 'eat your fingers off'; Electrolux is said to have run 'Nothing sucks like an Electrolux' — fine in Britain, toxic in America. Unintended meanings: in 1997 Nike withdrew tens of thousands of pairs of trainers after a flame logo was read as resembling the Arabic script for 'Allah'. Inappropriate branding and promotion: Dolce & Gabbana's 2018 campaign showing a Chinese model struggling to eat pizza with chopsticks was read as mockery — its Shanghai show was cancelled within days, Chinese e-commerce platforms delisted the brand, and its China sales collapsed. Add the quieter traps: colour symbolism (white signifies mourning in parts of East Asia), unlucky numbers (4 in China and Japan), and plain differences in taste — sweetness, spice, portion size.
The analytical point beneath the anecdotes: these failures are cheap to prevent — local managers, native-speaker checks, consumer testing — and catastrophically expensive to commit. That asymmetry is the practical argument for polycentric and geocentric approaches.
VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for
TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks
ExamWhat examiners want
Name the approach and evidence it. If the case business tailors its menu, prices and promotion country by country, say 'polycentric' and prove it from the extract — the spec's vocabulary (ethnocentric, polycentric, geocentric, glocalisation) earns knowledge marks that a generic 'they adapt to culture' does not. The 4Ps are your analysis scaffold: a level-4 answer adapts each P specifically to the named market, rather than asserting that 'the business should adapt its marketing'.
Evaluation on 4.3 nearly always turns on the standardise–adapt trade-off: weigh what adaptation costs (shorter production runs, separate campaigns, lost scale economies) against what it protects (relevance, and the avoidance of disasters like Dolce & Gabbana's China collapse). Strong conclusions are conditional on product type — taste-based products such as food and drink demand far more adaptation than technology or luxury — and on the segment: a global niche punishes adaptation of the core product but rewards adaptation of distribution and promotion.