6:59:00 PM
Specificities of International Marketing
he marketing approach is based on understanding and reacting to demand diversity. Any company seeking to build a long-lasting competitive position uses marketing to organise and manage this diversity in order to understand it and to adapt accordingly. Thus, the firm is bound to make numerous choices: target segments, target customers, prioritised deals, offer design and so on. Our initial perspective and the numerous examples we have introduced naturally placed our views within an international scope. Doing so makes the point that acting in an international context places the firm in an environment of a higher degree of complexity. This is the result of the view of the marketplace: differences on technological levels and cultural habits between geographical areas and countries, diversity of customers and their organisational structures, the variety of networks and value chains or clusters. The marketing approach and methods that we have discussed are well adapted to deal with market diversity and heterogeneity. We could well stick to a technical point of view and not examine the international field at all. However, this increased complexity challenges any firm in organising its marketing activities, and it is necessary to identify and attempt to solve the questions that it raises. Understanding this complexity is not an easy task, as it does not present itself uniformly when dealing with different industrial sectors, customer portfolios, competitors' position or types of offer.
A first difficulty appears when trying to separate international marketing from the firm's international strategy. Consequently, we chose to limit our discussion to the design of an international customer and offer policy, and to the questions linked to the organisation of the marketing function in an international arena. We shall not treat such themes as how to take a foothold in foreign markets, the localisation of the manufacturing units, the specificities of local tax or legal systems, the international financial operations and other important issues.
Two realities actually affect international marketing. First, what is the kind of firm that we are looking at? Is it possible to analyse the international marketing strategy of large concerns such as BP or Dow Chemical and that of a small European company such as Elcometer. that nevertheless exports a significant amount of its output, in the same way? Secondly, the degree of concentration of the customer base has to be taken into account. It is not possible to use the same approaches and methods for 15 car manufacturers as for 5 million garages. We shall try to define clearly all the time the situation that we have in mind.
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