When I was a graduate student (both times, actually) I was
part of a study group that met every week to go over some of the more
impossible aspects of our course of study, and we all took turns bringing snack
foods to the meeting. When it was my turn I would usually bring doughnuts,
because they are filling, taste good, and can be economically obtained in large
quantities. However, I rapidly noticed that different members of the group had
different ideas about what constituted a good pastry. My friends from China,
for example, told me that American people put too much sugar on everything –
which makes perfect sense when you realize that neither sugar beets nor sugar
cane are native to China. Accordingly, there is no local equivalent to the gooey
pastry beloved of Americans and some European nations. From then on I made a
point of buying plain cake doughnuts, without frosting or filling, and our Chinese
friends loved them; they said it was the best snack food we had in America…
Our Korean students loved the doughnuts with the thick white
icing and colorful sprinkles; even some of the women who had never been known
to eat junk food (or much of anything else, actually) could be counted on to
have one or two of these. Some of the Northern Europeans like icing and frosting
more than anybody else, and I made sure to have some for them, while the
Eastern European nations go in more for light and flaky pastry and fruit
fillings – powdered sugar doughnuts, lightly glazed doughnuts or occasionally
jelly doughnuts or apple fritters went over big here. And, of course, my fellow
Americans love anything frosted with sugar, chocolate, glaze, icing, filling,
cream, maple syrup, or all of the above at once, which made it relatively easy
to round out my order…
Over the years I’ve come to refer to this as Belin’s
Doughnut of National Preference – which is a reference to Porter’s Diamond of
National Advantage; a well-known construct developed by Dr. Michael Porter at
Harvard to account for why some nations are more successful in international
trade competition than others. Unlike the better known Diamond construct, I can’t
back my Doughnut up with anything more concrete than many years of personal
observation, but there was an article this past week that does seem to support
my thesis. The Viral Nova website published at list of foreign snack foods,
complete with pictures, and I call your attention to #5 – the Dry Pork and
Seaweed Doughnut offered by Dunkin Doughnuts in China – and to #12, the Wasabi
Cheese and Seaweed Cheese Doughnuts offered by Dunkin in Singapore. While
certainly not conclusive, this information does appear to support my contention
that different people have different ideas about what constitutes a good
doughnut…
Now, I don’t mean to suggest that this observation is
particularly deep or especially profound; in fact, it’s about as simple an
explanation of National product preferences as you could ask for. But then,
that’s the point: finding out what your customers in a specific country, state
or city prefer is a painstaking activity that will require considerable research;
recognizing that they have unique preferences, and that these may very well NOT
be the same as your own preferences, is as simple as sharing doughnuts with
your colleagues on a rainy afternoon and watching what each of them likes to
eat…
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