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Understanding Indonesian Culture

Culture is so fascinating. It is also important if you want to market a product (or service) to the people in that culture. To understand the culture, you have to be there - sort of speak. It baffles me that many IT-related companies are not in Indonesia to understand our culture :)

This morning, I found this survey site that surveys the best football clubs according to their fans. (Here football means soccer in the North American term :)) The result is ... Persib is number one. Persib even beats Barca. ha ha ha. I guess most people - outside Indonesians - will find that strange. I don't. What/who is Persib? It's our city's (Bandung) football club.

Indonesian football fans are maniacs. Just like UK's hooligans. The number of internet users in Indonesia is around 60 millions (according to Association of Indonesian ISPs). The number of cellphone users is easily doubles that. (The number of prepaid cell numbers already more than 200 millions.) You just add both of them - fans + internet users - and you'll get a high number. Surveys like the above will produce the expected result.

[Thinking of products/services for these fans ... Hmmm ...]

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