Having taken the evening off to watch the Oscars, I hadn’t read a scary story about the economy in, oh, 14 hours or so. So I was relieved to get back into “read it and cringe” mode with a story from TechCrunch reporter Sarah Lacy about why the smart VCs are moving their investments from Silicon Valley to overseas haunts such as China India Israel
Her basic take is that venture capital isn’t focused on high-tech per se, but on high growth, and emerging markets with rapidly rising incomes are more lucrative than mature markets such as information technology. This got me, as a marketing writer/consultant, wondering if the B2B marketing and PR business is about to go the way of America's auto business, hollowed out by foreign competition.
It’s definitely true that talent is global (as evidenced, again, by the Oscars) but the infrastructure to turn great ideas into profits isn’t quite so well distributed. Marketing is, in large part, a language skill, and language is local. (Just look at the English-language Web sites of some foreign-based IT vendors to see what I mean.) I would argue a lot of the marketing/PR infrastructure for B2B products and services will stay local, because understanding the year-in, year-out shifts in language, grammar and cultural references – even changes in mood like the current mania for frugal living in the U.S. – requires living locally.
As long as the U.S. remains one of the world’s largest markets, then, B2B startups will still have to spend a good deal of their marketing dollars here in the U.S. Or am I whistling past the graveyard?
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