Editorial

Citation

Hayes, S. (2014), "Editorial", Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management, Vol. 18 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/JFMM-05-2014-0030

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management, Volume 18, Issue 3

MINTy fresh: who doesn’t love a good acronym?

Some 13 years ago, Jim O’Neill coined the term BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) for four countries set to join the G6 as economic big hitters. Jim has returned recently offering us four more countries (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey) from whom to expect phenomenal economic growth. “If they get their act together, they’ve got the ability to get so much bigger, If not as big as the BRICs, then not that far off” commented O’Neill in his BBC radio series, MINT: The Next Economic Giants (Radio 4, January 2014).

Mexico, O’Neill argues, previously lost out to China on cheap exports and labour. But, as most of us involved with the fashion business know, with wages increasing in China, Mexico can capitalise on its proximity to the USA – arguably the archetypal western region.

Indonesia too has an opportunity to excel, like Mexico, because of a large, willing workforce and a rapidly urbanising population. Indonesia is the fourth largest populated country in the world with near neighbours all around the Asia-Pacific region.

Turkey has a natural and enviable geographical advantage, being located between the east and the west and “because they know how to deal with us in the West, with the Middle East, and with the Russians”, as O’Neill put it; Turkey, and Istanbul in particular, seems to be racing towards a position as the major hub between economic and political regions around its locust.

However, according to O’Neill, Nigeria is the most exciting of these emerging economic powers. “The place is complete madness, of course, and one can’t be 100 per cent sure, given its challenges, that it will be one country in four years. But, after India, it's the best in the world in terms of useful population. By 2050, Nigeria will have more people than the United States. If you get those young people in productive jobs, that place will arguably be the most exciting country in the world in the next 30 years. Linked to that, there are so many creative entrepreneurs there and, interestingly, so many educated Nigerians returning from the US because they smell this opportunity to be the next big thing”. Nigeria is also rich in resources, including oil.

However, what does the MINT prediction mean for fashion? Is it a solid vision of the future economic giants or merely a selection of countries that make up a pleasing acronym?

Mexico and Turkey are no strangers to us in terms of exporting to the USA and Europe, respectively, but will they be as useful to the west as a market to consume their “products”. For economic growth to occur in the developed nations they must increase their exports (whilst reducing – a little – their imports, I’ll come back to this). Those exports are increasingly likely to be in terms of services and knowledge rather than products and machines. As the emerging economic powers develop into regions of great consumption as well as creation the opportunities for truly “glocal” organisations must become increasingly fertile. Products made there to be consumed there but conceived, designed and developed here. If, at the same time, western economies can restructure their apparel manufacturing industry domestically – perhaps along the lines of the Purchase Activated Manufacturing (PAM) model or with virtually networked distributed micro-factories – to encourage a similarly locally produced/locally consumed approach the perhaps a re-balance of balanced sourcing will occur. A really fresh approach (Table I).

Steven Hayes