Why the Americas?
For one thing, we don't think you can consider North America without keeping el Sur in mind. By the same token, you can't understand el Sur without understanding el Norte.
DAVID ROJAS has studied global products and local market settings like this one in Bolivia. Both so-called traditional and global products and retail settings coexist here, just like anywhere else in the world.
Among the greatest mistakes made by a certain large clothing retailer was to guess that Chile and Puerto Rico would be the same. The same thing happened to a rather well-known big-box home-supply store. They both blew it. How many millions in capital that could have provided good jobs and new and interesting products ended up in the dumpster? Planners up in el Norte figured that all of Latin America (el Sur) was the same thing. They were wrong.
The interesting thing is that this knife cuts both ways. A company we know in in the Southern Cone is expanding its reach up north, into the Andean countries. But they find that consumers aren't quite the same, up there. And, an El Salvadoran fast-food chain, the delicious Pollo Campero, is now in Los Angeles. But will their roasted chicken break out of the Salvadoreño neighborhood? Not without some help, it won't.
With Sergio Poblete O. in Santiago, and with David Rojas E. up in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, our team is figuring out what questions to ask about consumers, consumption, and services in the el Sur part of the Americas. (Ken is helping too: he grew up in border-town Los Angeles, and he teaches at Adolfo Ibáñez University in Chile each year.) Up in el Norte, Martin Høyem and Hai Nguyen (with help from Bruno Moyné our ethnographic videographer) are finding that you can't consider fast-food at a broad, U.S. level unless you understand both the growing Latino market(s) and the Latinos who often work in the back of the house.
The point is that the U.S.A. and Canada and all of Latin America are culturally complex places. Plenty of conflict and innovation, discovery and household anxiety to go around. Plenty of fun, too. Ask Sergio about where to get the best empanadas, ask David about the highest elevation wineries in the world, or ask Martin (our designer, web-guy, and ethnographer from Norway) about where to get good eats in Pasadena. They'll point you to the the cultural borderlands where new ideas and new tools for businesses and for sustainable human development are to be found.