The word glocal is a fusion of global and local.
According to the Oxford Dictionary of New Words, the term is modelled on the Japanese dochakuka, (deriving from dochaku, "living on one's own land) It originally referred to the agricultural principle of adapting one's farm techniques to local conditions -- to make something indigenous. The term was taken up by Japanese business interests in the 1980's for strategies of global localization.
Glocalization has provided a way for multinational corporations to distance themselves from Americanization. Savvy multinationals, such as Coca-Cola were able to establish "local relevance" by claiming "We are not a multi-national. We are a multi-local." One of the leaders in "glocal" marketing was said to be McDonald's, which "has adapted itself so successfully to foreign markets that consumers outside the US often believe it is a domestic company."
In a similar way, "Mass-customization" is a production technique that promises to reconfigure the generic and the particular. These examples are seller's strategies to cater to cultural differences and are known as micro-marketing. But these techniques create increasingly differentiated consumers just as much as they respond to existing varietes or heterogeneities.
For some cultural critics, these techniques reflect an important dimension of globalization. Rather than pitting the local versus the global, homogeneity versus heterogeneity etc. the awareness of the finitude of "one world" has paradoxically enabled the recognition of a greater diversity of local cultures. Interpretations that stress the resilience of peripheral cultures emphasize their strategies for absorption, assimilation , or resistance. (cf. "poaching" in strategy / tactics) Hybridization or creolization are some of the names given to ways in which the meaning of externally originated goods, information, or images are reworked, syncretized and blended with existing cultural traditions and forms of life.
Two mega-trends of globalization are at work here a mega-trend of practical (even material) homogenization, which levels distinctions, and an opposite mega-trend of symbolic heterogenization, which is made necessary exactly because of the global ironing of differences. While any product must turn into a standardized brand , any product must also be branded slightly differently from others, in order to gain a promotional advantage over other brands. But these two trends operate at different levels. At issue is not so much the cultural imperialism Americanization versus other cultures (eg. Islam), but a deep-seated structural process of global commodification that not only tolerates but actively promotes local heterogeneity and authenticity at the symbolic level.
Examples like "Mecca Cola", the "new veiling", the transformation of the veil into a fashion statement (and the related religious issues into an issue of dress) or the "branding" of mosques (and also the commercial development of Mecca itself) illustrate the "preservation by degradation" of local symbols in commodified structures. This "Glocommodification" is the general drift towards, on the one hand, planetary commodification and instrumentalization, and on the other hand, towards a proliferation of symbols of local and "authentic" identities. This is the sense in which Barber can claim that "Jihad is a creation of McWorld, not its opposite". (p.157)