What the Honda Super Cub Can Teach Us About Designing for Global Markets

Most companies approach emerging markets with one of three flawed strategies: they try to sell their premium products to the wealthy few and wait for the market to “catch up,” strip features off existing products to lower the price, or micro-size their offerings into single-use portions. All three usually fail because they assume that consumers in poorer markets want the same things as wealthier countries, only cheaper. But they don’t. Emerging markets—those which have historically been resource-constrained but have benefited from rapid economic growth in the past 25 years—often demand a fundamentally different combination of affordability, performance, reliability, usability, and cultural fit. Reaching that combination requires genuine innovation, not hand-me-downs. In our book Global by Design: How to Create Innovations That Scale, Travel, and Transform, from which the examples in this article are derived, we present an approach to creating the high-performance, low-cost products demanded by emerging markets.