Anyone who has worked for branded goods in an emerging market, can understand how different it is for consumers.

As marketers, we used to compare the consumer’s purchasing power in any given country and for any given period, by using products that somehow exist everywhere. I was so much familiar with the “Big Mac” measure. But time is changing, iPhone has been added to the list of benchmarks. According to this report, it costs a day’s work to buy an iPhone in NYC but 13 weeks in Kiev, Ukraine. That changes everything. It makes global operations, customers, products, and marketing itself even more fascinating.

Photo: Jason Wright