ULUSLARARASI İŞLETME

Mediascapes are about the production and dissemination of information through different types of media where the boundaries between the real and the fictional blur.

Ideoscapes are political, and they indicate mainly the spread of the Enlightenment worldview, which consists of notions like democracy, welfare, freedom, rights, and sovereignty.

Culture is not static but dynamic.

Power distance demonstrates the degree of tolerance toward the unequal distribution of power in a society (Usunier and Lee, 2005).

In centrally-planned capitalism, resources are owned privately, but the state conducts resource allocation.

Quotas are restrictions on the amount of a product imported to or exported from the country within a specified period.

Market access is a factor that influences the firm’s ability to serve the market.

Global consumer culture positioning means that the brand identifies a specific segment of the global consumer culture.

Positioning is a strategy which aims to differentiate the brand in the consumer’s mind from the competitor’s brand in terms of the attributes and benefits offered by that brand.

The core customer value refers to the benefit of the product to the customers

Financescapes are the intricate movements of global capital in the form of currency markets, national stock exchanges, and speculations.

Two different perspectives used in understanding cultures are discussed. The first perspective is Hofstede’s (2001) national culture framework, and the second one is Meamber and Venkatesh’s (2000) ethnoconsumerist methodology.

Hofstede (2001) is a social psychologist who introduced cultural dimensions that are extensively used by international marketers to compare consumer behavior in different nations.

The notion of uncertainty avoidance measures how threatened people feel in certain situations. If uncertainty is high in a society, the level of anxiety and aggressiveness is high, and procedures and rules are encouraged.

International marketers need to recognize what type of economic system dominates the potential market to enter. Market capitalism, centrally-planned socialism, centrally-planned capitalism, and market socialism are the four traditionally defined economic systems (Keegan and Green, 2017).

International market segmentation is informed from an analysis of two groups of knowledge: the firm and the environment. The marketer checks:

Market potential is a measure that combines the size of the market and the competitive advantage used to compare markets.

Positioning is a strategy which aims to differentiate the brand in the consumer’s mind from the competitor’s brand in terms of the attributes and benefits offered by that brand. There can be three alternative scales: global consumer culture, foreign consumer culture, and local consumer culture (Keegan et al., 2017). Global consumer culture positioning means that the brand identifies a specific segment of the global consumer culture. For example, in the early 2000s, UGG boots became popular among the upper-middle-class global youth female subculture.  An alternative positioning strategy is foreign consumer culture positioning, where the company associates the brand with a specific foreign country or culture. For example, Levi’s Jeans symbolically associates itself with America or the Wild West, Volkswagen associates itself with German Engineering by Das Auto slogan. Alden et al. (1999) argue that foreign consumer culture positioning is less common than global and local consumer culture positioning strategies. The final positioning strategy aims to associate the brand with the local consumer culture. McTurko in Turkey or McFalafel in Egypt are examples of local consumer culture positioning.

Penetration pricing a strategy designed to offer a product at a low price to increase sales. Penetration pricing is used when unit costs decrease as a result of economies of scale, when there is a mass market, and when the customers are price-sensitive. Penetration pricing can be successful if the manager keeps an eye on the competitors’ pricing strategies because if they decrease their prices to a certain level and catch customers, the firm may not generate profit through mass marketing.

While deciding on the foreign distribution channels, an international marketer needs to consider nine criteria: consumers and their characteristics, culture, the character of the channel, necessary capital, cost, competition, coverage, continuity, and control.

Polycentric pricing is a price policy which assigns market-specific prices to the product. If the company uses independent distributors in channeling the product, then the pricing decision is dominated by the independent distributors. Sometimes the price differences between countries can be higher than the costs incurred from the distribution costs. Then, customers may prefer to go to a foreign land to purchase the product cheaper.