I think for businesses that don’t export and considering it. I mean we heard tonight how most design consultancies they happen to have got into export by default. So it’s been an approach by an overseas client or maybe a client of theirs has asked them to design for an overseas market that has opened up the opportunity. I think for the most part that tends to be the way that people will then to go on to develop business. If you happen to have had an approach say from Moscow, for a piece of work then it doesn’t hurt to do some research on the local market and look at other opportunities that might be sitting on the doorstep. Extend your trip by a few days and look at the potential for developing new business. I do think, an interesting point is, a difference in culture between different countries and if you’re trying to break into the Asian market they expect to see you physically or quite frequently. There is an issue there around the cost of developing that type of work against, for example, maybe focussing on a market that is close to home that is practically cheaper to get to and faster. You can get there and back in a day and it’s not too exhausting. I would say for smaller businesses look to local markets, markets that are close to us and for opportunities there.
I think the competitive edge in the UK is actually its time zone and global position. We have a lot of work from West Coast brands working with Asian engineers and we’re nicely on GMT so we can talk to both on the same day. The cultural melting pot has come out from the research and that’s very, very important and I think also there’s a professionalism in UK design that is not in itself a benefit, but should give UK companies and edge when they actually create and define their own propositions. Your best bet is to try and find a UK company that out sources to Asia and then impress the company in Asia and then maybe you might get to work for them directly in other markets.
It comes back again to some of the other stuff that Gus was talking about. We know better, so because we’re dealing with Asians quite often they don’t like the, I wouldn’t say confrontational, but frankly we like to ask questions. In Korea you don’t really ask questions, you accept what you’re given. So if we ask too many questions you get to the fact that we’re trying to push too much. Quite often we get “you don’t own all these countries any more, you’re just one small little country.” But a very influential country I think. I think it’s really healthy that Nokia are now moving to the centre, LG have realised that the centre of design, more or less I’d say the world actually not just Europe is in London. But we as the UK, I think the UK has all the other designers here, not just English designers. I think of all the other designers that have come here, they’re all part of UK, so it’s great for the whole world in this country. So that influence will actually spread out.
If the UK design agency is interested in working internationally and they really don’t know where to start, they can either pick up the phone to me, send me an email. There’s also UK Trade and Investment all through the nations and regions of Britain have international trade advisers. There is a creative industry specialist at every single UKTI office in the country, so they can speak to them – if they contact me I can let them have the details. That specialist can sit down with them, free of charge, sit down and have an initial consultation of where they might want to go, where their strengths are, what markets might be of interest to them and in some cases there’s financial support available. So it’s not a difficult step but it’s just a question of having the courage of just sticking your head above the parapet and talking to people.
I think it is well placed at the moment but I don’t think we can be at all complacent about that. We are existing in a much more global context than we have I think in any time in history and that gets smaller every day. Whether it’s the internet or just the fact that international business is very globally based. Also, although I think we have benefited from the, to be honest the history of the UK in terms of it’s imperial ambitions and as a consequence it’s a very multi cultural society, I think that benefits the design industry but also now we’re educating the design community for the rest of the world as well. Foreign students, because design courses aren’t very well funded, so they need to attract foreign students to bring them here. I think we have to be careful about that because we are creating our competitors of the future. International travel is easier because of economy airlines so the investment isn’t necessarily as much as it used to be but of course there is an environmental cost that we have to watch. But also the world is smaller in terms of the internet, you can publish yourself online or distribute your latest work etc globally at the touch of a button. So you use the power of that communication to develop business from a worldwide basis. Also we’re finding increasingly, although initially to develop relationships with clients, you need some face time to understand each other and to really understand the marketplace. Over time as that relationship and trust develops you actually don’t need to meet so often or you can do it through Skype, video conferencing etc. You can just be sending work as PDFs, even three-dimensional PDFs these days that the client can rotate etc. So the world is actually very accessible for even small companies.
My experience is all about, I’ve always believed that you can’t work in a foreign market without collaborating with a local agency. So everything that we’ve done has been not about not about setting up green field sites, it’s been about finding good practitioners in the market and then doing joint projects with them. Where they get the benefit and the kudos of having a London based agency and we get the benefit and kudos of having a local, if you like, people with local insight.
Know what you’re good at. If you’re getting out of your depth say so and get off there, actually don’t try to, it’s the classic old thing don’t over-promise what you can’t deliver. More so because in the area of branding it’s touch points are everywhere from interiors to logos to web to product and so on. So you have to make sure that you really know what you’re doing and you partner people who you feel comfortable with who share the same vision. I think too many design companies are too greedy because we think of ourselves as businesses and forget that actually what we’re selling is a specific set of skills. It’s better to be an advisor and a consultant where you actually get recognised for your quality of thinking than to be someone who tries to say “they need a website and we’ve never done Flash, whatever version we’re up to.” You start doing it and you make a big cock-up.