One Size Rarely Fits All
Top-down Plans Too Often Fail, While Local Fit Leads to Better Outcomes
by Conrad Phillip Kottak, November 18, 2025
Why One Size Rarely Works
The quickest way to wreck a potentially good idea is to try to impose it everywhere. Planners love blueprints, but real communities do not behave like diagrams. People follow local habits, local rhythms, and local expectations. Any program that ignores local culture ends up fighting the very people it is supposed to help.
Beer: Knowing the Room Matters
In An Anthropologist Walks into a Bar, Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel Rasmussen describe how the beer company BeerCo hired ethnographers to study pubs in Finland and the United Kingdom. After 150+ hours of video and extensive field notes, the conclusion was unmistakable. No single marketing strategy could reach such different bar cultures. When BeerCo switched to tailored promotions, individualized outreach, and even small gestures like late night taxi rides for staff, sales rose. The company succeeded only after it stopped pretending all pubs were cut from the same cloth (Madsbjerg and Rasmussen 2014).
McDonald’s in Brazil: Adaptation, Not Cloning
McDonald’s initially made a similar mistake. The company tried to transplant U.S. assumptions into Brazil: fast lunches, car culture, drive-ups. None of it fit Brazil’s dense coastal cities and tradition of long midday meals. Brazilians also avoid hot foods at the beach, which made early ads almost comically off target. Over time McDonald’s learned to anchor itself in Brazilian habits. Light evening meals offered one opening. So did Sunday nights, the cook’s day off. The addition of Brazilian dishes like pão de queijo (cheese bread) and feijoadas helped the chain settle in. Today it has more than 1,000 outlets in Brazil, because it adapted rather than insisted. Only after decades of fitting in has McDonald’s been able to take advantage of newer, more U.S.-like patterns, such as shorter lunch breaks and expanding highways.
Development Projects: When Culture Decides Outcomes
Two planning errors show up again and again. The first is the fallacy of overinnovation, which pushes changes that people neither asked for nor want. New Coke is a textbook example. In 1985 Coca-Cola replaced its original formula with a “modernized” version. Nobody had demanded the change, and customers revolted. Coca-Cola Classic had to be brought back almost immediately. Top-down change failed because the company ignored people’s existing preferences.
The second error is the fallacy of underdifferentiation, which treats different societies or localities as though they share the same wants, needs, institutions, and values. For example, planners dropped nuclear-family farm models into regions built on extended kin groups. They imported cooperative structures that ignored local social organization. Projects survived only when participants rebuilt them using their own networks.
In my comparative work, culturally compatible projects consistently produced better outcomes than incompatible ones. Later reviews by the World Bank reached the same conclusion. Local institutions and local politics shape success far more than any technical plan laid out on paper (Kottak 1990; Kottak 1991; Mansuri and Rao 2013).
Politics: Match Message to Map
The same principle applies to U.S. politics. Democrats do not need one ideological identity. They need different approaches in different places. As Gavin Newsom has put it “I want it [the Democratic party] to be the Manchin to Mamdani party. I want it to be inclusive (Jonathan Martin, Politico, November 15, 2025).
Progressives can win where the electorate leans liberal. Zohran Mamdani in New York and Seattle’s new progressive mayor show how this works in liberal cities. Those strategies will not work in Omaha or even Atlanta.
Moderates such as Mikie Sherrill, Abigail S, panberger, and Elissa Slotkin—the “Security Moms”—fit their more mixed states. Trump’s improved 2024 performance in Michigan shows how uneven the terrain has become. Slotkin still won her Senate race, but she had to fight for every vote. With Zohran Momdani as the candidate, Michigan would have elected as U.S. Senator Mike Rogers, a Republican.
Affordability: The Issue that Cut Through Everything
Across New York, New Jersey, and Virginia, one key issue, affordability, did rise to the top. People are tired of paying high grocery and living costs.
“Even Donald Trump, whose frame has perhaps never darkened a grocery store doorway, and who seems barely familiar with the words ‘groceries’ and ‘affordability,’ has hopped on the affordability bandwagon.”
Perceptions that the U.S. economy was weaker than it actually was helped elect Trump in 2024. Since then, many voters have soured on his tariff strategy, which raises prices for consumers and increases input costs and retaliatory losses for farmers and ranchers. His “they/them” antitransgender ad may have helped in some pockets, but the real drivers remained the economy and immigration.
Nationalized Issues Still Land Locally
Immigration pressures vary sharply by region, even though the national economy depends heavily on immigrant labor. Attitudes toward nonbinary and trans identities also differ. They are often most hostile in places where people rarely meet anyone who identifies that way. Wyoming is not New York.
The Takeaway
There is no universal plan. Not for development. Not for business. Not for politics. If you want a project, a campaign, or an organization to work, you have to match the plan to the place. Otherwise, the place will reject it, loudly and predictably. Zohran for NYC, Seattle, Berkeley, or Vermont; Abigail, Elissa, and Mikie for most other places.
Sources (list)
Madsbjerg, Christian, and Mikkel Rasmussen. 2014. Harvard Business Review, “An Anthropologist Walks into a Bar.”
Kottak, Conrad. 1990. Comparative analysis of culturally compatible development projects.
Kottak, Conrad. 1991. Follow up studies on local institutions and project outcomes.
Mansuri, Ghazala, and Vijayendra Rao. 2013. Localizing Development: Does Participation Work? World Bank.
McDonald’s Brazil corporate site; ethnographic case studies on menu localization.
Jonathan Martin, Politico, November 15, 2025.
Another example: An agricultural missionary in northeast Nigeria, Keith's friend Gerold Neher, found that well-meaning donations of goats and chickens could not thrive in that area; after mating with local breeds, offspring were productive. (Neher, My Nigeria)