International Marketing and Production

Actors—such as designers, advertising agencies, suppliers, retailers, and consultants—operating within a global commodity chain co-create market value for the global markets.

Consumers are also active in co-creating the meanings of market offerings through a variety of global and local interactions. Examples of such interactions are modes of human mobility and multiple types of media. Immigration, student exchange programs, or the global tourism sector demonstrate human mobility. In line with technological advancements, a variety of media became accessible to many. Moreover, social media created social links among people at the global level.

International marketing is not very different from domestic marketing in terms of its function for a business and its approach in conducting marketing activities. Both domestic and international marketers aim to make profits and satisfy the needs and wants of the customer. 

The basic definition of international marketing is:

the marketing of goods, services, and information across political boundaries by using marketing elements like planning, promoting, pricing, and distributing, and supporting the products in order to satisfy the needs of the foreign markets better than the competitors

There are two main tendencies in international marketing strategy identified by similar terms: standardization versus adaptation, or globalization versus localization, or global integration versus global responsivenes. 

However, well-known global brands tailor their marketing activities to satisfy the local markets, which are shaped better by their local cultures than by those of the competitors’. For example, although Coca-Cola markets the same product range across the global markets, its advertising campaigns are tailored according to the food culture and rituals of the local markets. The Ramadan and Christmas ad campaigns tailored explicitly for Islamic and Western countries respectively exemplify this adaptation process.

The convergence perspective assumes the centerperiphery model for the global economy. The Developed countries constitute the center, and they produce and market goods to the developing markets.

Appadurai (1990) presents a framework consisting of five conditions under which global flows occur, and he explains the complex nature of the global cultural economy, which develops amidst the disjunctures between economy, culture, and politics. These five conditions are ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes.

Ethnoscapes are the people mobile throughout the globe, such as immigrants, tourists, guest workers. So, these mobile people always get in contact with the stable ones. Their mobility influences the politics of and between nations.

Mediascapes are about the production and dissemination of information through different types of media where the boundaries between the real and the fictional blur. Mediascapes create and introduce imagined lives, places, and lifestyles.

Financescapes are the intricate movements of global capital in the form of currency markets, national stock exchanges, and speculations. Interactions of ethnoscapes, technoscapes, and financescapes are unpredictable because each of these scapes is subject to different incentives or constraints that are political, informational, and technoenvironmental.

Technoscapes are the sorts of technology (high or low, mechanical or informational) spread amidst “complex relationships between money flows, political possibilities, and the availability of both low and highly-skilled labor”.

Ideoscapes are political, and they indicate mainly the spread of the Enlightenment worldview, which consists of notions like democracy, welfare, freedom, rights, and sovereignty. The complexity introduced through global interactions eliminates the formation of a single global market.

The basic characteristics of culture are as follows (Hollensen, 2017):
• Culture is learned throughout childhood. Cultural values are internalized by interacting with the members of one’s family, getting rewards or punishments, negotiating what one wants, and causing and avoiding conflict.
• Culture is interrelated within. Different parts of culture are connected, e.g., religion and marriage.
• Culture is shared. Values are passed from one member to another.

A low psychic distance country is a country that is less different from its counterpart in terms of language, culture, political system, level of education, and level of industrial development.

Low cultural distance means perceptions of the home, and the host countries are similar. For example, Romania and Turkey might be different in many aspects, but marketers might perceive them as two very similar countries.

Low geographic distance refers to the closer spatial proximity between the two countries. SMEs can prefer using such a simple guide in selecting which markets to operate in.

Marketing advantage refers to providing a better market offering than competitors due to extensive distribution and effective promotion. The market potential is calculated by multiplying the market size and competitive advantage.

Products have tangible and intangible components and can be conceptualized at three levels: core customer value, actual product, and the augmented product.

Distribution is a process which involves the physical handling and transfer of goods; change in the ownership of goods among the producers; the middleman, the buyer, and negotiations and agreements among these actors.