The godfather of the notion of triadization is Kenichi Ohmae, the managing director of the Tokyo office of McKinsey and Company, a well-known international consulting firm. In his book TriadPower: The Coming Shape o/Global Competition} Ohmae asserted that "there is an emergence of the Triadians, or the residents of Japan, [North] America, and the European community .... These are the people whose academic backgrounds, income levels (both discretionary and nondiscretionary), lifestyle, use of leisure time, and aspirations are quite similar." 1
According to Ohmae, for a firm to survive and grow, it must attempt to become an "insider." To do so it must abandon the so-called United Nations model, which enticed management to neglect the significance of the Triad and treat the world as if it consisted of hundreds of equally important markets. If firms are to succeed, says Ohmae, they must develop products and techniques that will capitalize on the similarities of these three markets and yet accommodate their differences. The cost of adapting to the local peculiarities of only three markets is much less than that of adapting to hundreds of markets and is offset by the large volume that the large markets can accommodate. It is much more efficient to adapt a product or a technique to a market with six hundred million potential customers with large disposable incomes than to adapt it to several small markets each composed of only a few thousand potential customers with diverse tastes and marketing awareness levels and low incomes.
This book views the world, as Buckminster Fuller did, as a "spaceship earth." On this spaceship humans live in Peter Drucker's "global village," which is experiencing a converging commonality. This converging commonality has created "a new commercial reality-the emergence of global markets for standardized consumer products on a previously unimagined scale of magnitude. 2
Proponents of Levitt's philosophy of globalization advise their listeners to concentrate on the standardized products everyone wants rather than worry about the thousands of di1ferent products that customers in different markets might-or might not-like. It is possible to get the impression that managers can assume that what is appropriate for the home country is appropriate for the whole world. Nothing is further from the truth. Rather, the manager is advised to "think globally and act locally." Product design and marketing techniques should be guided by the converging commonality. An understanding of this superforce of converging commonality, however, requires considerable study of many diverse forces in operation in many distinctly di1ferent countries with unique sociocultural, economic, and political attitudes and systems. It is only after careful examination of these "globes" that a truly global strategy can be designed and successfully implemented.
Unity in diversity is indeed the main principle of general systems theory. The world can be looked at as an open system composed of many subsystems, each of which has its own images, aspirations, inspirations, objectives, and goals to accomplish. A global marketing strategy incorporates the common attributes of a number of these subsystems. Attempting to sell a product globally Simply because it has successfully satisfied the home country's needs is not globalism; rather, it is ethnocentrism-the self-centered and mistaken assumption that what is good for one's own nation or people, the "ethnos," is good for the rest of the world.
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