International Marketing

International Marketing

Marketing is a challenging and important part of business. Rapid changes in Internet opportunities and in consumer tastes, intense global competition, privatized and deregulated industries, accelerated technologies and maturing markets create threats as well as opportunities for profit and non-profit organizations. Marketing plays a major role in determining an organization’s response to a rapidly changing environment. Sophisticated marketing has become a dominant feature of dynamic companies in the 21st century.

Managers
Managers around the globe are recognizing the increasing necessity for their companies and organization to develop the skills, aptitudes and knowledge to compete effectively in international markets.
The emergence of a more open world economy, the globalization of consumer tastes and the unabated expansion of Internet access globally all increase the inter-dependency and interconnections of nation economies across the globe. The need for managers to develop the skills to respond to these pressures affects companies of all sizes.

What is international marketing?
International marketing involves the firm in making one or more marketing mix decisions across national boundaries. At its most complex, it involves the firm in establishing manufacturing/processing facilities around the world and coordinating marketing strategies across the globe. At one extreme there are firms that opt for ‘international marketing’ simply by signing a distribution agreement with a foreign agent who then takes on the responsibility for pricing, promotion, distribution and market development. At the other extreme, there are huge global companies such as Ford with an integrated network of manufacturing plants worldwide and who operate in some 150 country markets. Thus, at its most complex, international marketing becomes a process of managing on a global Licensed to: scale.

The International Marketing Environment
The key difference between domestic marketing and marketing on an international
scale is the multi-dimensionality and complexity of the many foreign country markets
a company may operate in. An international manager needs a knowledge and
awareness of these complexities and the implications they have for international
marketing management.

Implementation of the marketing plan
Having agreed the overall marketing strategy, plans for implementation are required at a central and local subsidiary level. Firms usually allocate resources to individual subsidiaries on a top-down basis, but this needs to be modified to include the special allocations made to enable foreign subsidiaries to resource specific market opportunities or difficulties encountered in particular markets.
Agreement is reached through a process of discussion between the operating department and management levels. Detailed budgets and timescales can then be set for all areas of marketing including those outside agencies (such as marketing researchers, designers and advertising agencies) in order to ensure that their contributions are delivered on time and within the budget. Some allowance must be made for those activities which might be more difficult to estimate in terms of cost or time, such as research and development of new products.