N.Z. businessmen 'too polite’

Press, 23 February 1980, Page 22

N.Z. businessmen 'too polite’

New Zealanders may be too polite when it comes to pushing themselves and their products in the internaional market place. That is the impression of Mr James Hagler, an American expert in international marketing.

Politeness in business was often misinterpreted as incompetence or softness, warned Mr Hagler, in Christchurch to speak at a seminar, entitled “A Promotional Mix for Export Marketing.” “You get cricket and business behaviour mixed, I think. Sometimes you can be so gentle about things that the customer loses the point,” he said. The natural gentlemanly qualities of New Zealanders spilt over into business situations, where a little more steel is needed, said Mr Hagler. For instance, even a “please” or “thank-you” from a New Zealand businessman to the waiter in an American restaurant could portray politeness to which the locals were quite unaccustomed. While being a gentleman was an admirable personal trait, it was a matter of striking a balance in international business, he said. Mr Hagler estimated that New Zealand had about 500 “hard-core” international marketers, who could handle themselves in New York or any competitive market. These were people trained at annual courses in New Zealand which were set up through the International Marketing Institute, an educational foundation based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and directed by Mr Hagler. A man with wide academic and practical experience in marketing, he has been director of the M.I.M. since 1960. It was impossible to have a theory of international

marketing, and it could be studied only through looking at cases, said Mr Hagler. The term “Marketing” itself had different definitions depending on the attitude of the individual. Two definitions quoted by Mr Hagler were “the delivery of a standard of living,” or “the delivery of a product from the producer to the consumer.” Marketing was inherent in any situation where a consumer had h choice between products, said Mr Hagler. That was a situation even Communist or Socialist economies could not avoid. The “hard-core” marketer would define his objective, but before making any decisions, he would study the underlying problems of the target market. Exporters could do 95 per cent of their preparation at home, leaving the remainder until they visited the potential buyer, he said. “That 5 per cent adds up to wanting to see what the person looks like, what his building is like, the ‘chemistry’.” Mr Hagler emphasised the

importance of exporters looking at their product from the viewpoint of the potential customer or consumers. “You must define products in terms of overseas markets and have an idea what your product is going to be used for,” he said. Mr Hagler totfk the example of a South African brewery he once worked for. It had been found that the emptv beer cans were used by the Bantus as toys, lamps, water pipes, and other items.

“They had 47 uses for a can, and all the time they (the brewery) thought they were just selling beer,” he said.

“The whole thing is a marketing situation.” Mr Hagler blamed “managerial hang-ups” for many missed export opportunities. Figures valid world-wide showed that 60 per cent of producers would never become international marketers.

These included businessmen who ruled out distant markets because of a failure to succeed on local ones, and those reluctant to trade with foreigners because of racial prejudices. However, many businesses succeeded on the international market for equally “irrational” reasons, said Mr Haglar. An export market could be viewed as an insurance policy for companies against a slump on local markets, he suggested. Governments round the world requested the M.I.M. to help their businesses to learn “the American approach to marketing,” said Mr Hagler.

American friends sometimes challenged him for “going out and helping our competitors.” Hit reply was; “well, if you believe in the free enterprise system. . . ”