Glocal

The term “glocal” is a portmanteau word of  “global” and “local“. It refers to The tailoring of globally produced products to make them suitable to local tastes and needs rather than trying to sell a ‘one size fits all’ version of their product in many markets.

The term “glocalization” originated from within Japanese business practices. It comes from the Japanese word “dochakuka“, which simply means “global localization”. Originally referring to a way of adapting farming techniques to local conditions, “dochakuka” evolved into a marketing strategy when Japanese businessmen adopted it in the 1980s. It was also used in the Global Change Exhibition (opened May 30, 1990) in the German Chancellery in Bonn by Manfred Lange, the director of the touring exhibit development team at that time.

The term was popularized in the English-speaking world by the British sociologist Roland Robertson in the 1990s, the Canadian sociologists Keith Hampton and Barry Wellman in the late 1990s, and Zygmunt Bauman. Hampton and Wellman have frequently used the term to refer to people who are actively involved in both local and wider-ranging activities of friendship, kinship and commerce. Thomas L. Friedman in “The World is Flat” talks about how the Internet encourages glocalisation, such as encouraging people to make websites in their native languages.

GLObal loCALIZATION: Specializing a Web site for a particular country by translating everything into that language. It also refers to targeting the site contents to the culture of the country.