Global Marketing

Global Marketing represents a different philosophy. It involves a focus on the similarities between markets around the world and attempts to develop and implement common product, place and promotion strategies and plans in those various markets.

Suggested approach to global marketing.

• Identify all important areas of similarity and all areas of difference between markets, based on market research in various markets, to clarify the degree of globalization that is appropriate and to assist in gaining commitment within the company towards the concept of global marketing.
• Delegate some decision-making to local management. Aim for a balance between centralized and decentralized decision-making. Include local management in the strategy planning process, partly to ensure recognition of local markets and partly to ensure local commitment to final plans.
• Clarify which elements of the marketing mix are essential in achieving the goals or objectives of the global plan. It may be appropriate to allow some degree of local modification to other elements of the mix. Such an approach will encourage innovation at the local level, and successful innovations in some markets may be transferable to other markets.
• Obtain adequate feedback from local management to enable common problems, for which global response is appropriate, to be identified, and to enable information about isolated problems and solutions to be disseminated throughout the company.
• Consider developing a strong international culture, partly through rotation of key (potential and existing) management personnel between head office and local or subsidiary operations; thus, avoiding the development of a bureaucratic, centralized ‘head office’ syndrome.

The Marketing Plan

A marketing strategy sets a target market and a marketing mix. It is the big picture of the company’s operation in a market. A Marketing plan goes further. A marketing plan is a written statement of a marketing strategy and the time-related details for carrying out the strategy. It should detail the following.

1. What marketing mix will be offered, to whom (that is, the target market) and for how long?

2. What company resources (shown as costs) will be needed at what rate (monthly perhaps)?

3. What results are expected (sales and profits or other organizational goals)?

The plan should also include control procedures, to ensure early detection of any problems. This might be something as simple as comparing actual sales against expected sales.

Gaining Breakthrough Opportunities

If you, as the marketer, fully understand the target markets, you may be able to develop marketing mixes that are superior to those of competitors. Such understanding may provide breakthrough opportunities. Taking advantage of these opportunities can lead to substantial sales and profit growth. This is why it is so important to search for these breakthrough opportunities rather than imitating your competitor’s offerings.

Let me give you an example of one such breakthrough offering. When Hilton Hosiery marketed its Razzamatazz brand socks, it realized that a new approach was needed. Most socks sold in supermarkets were dull, low-priced imports, with no brand differentiation. Acknowledging that socks were bought on impulse, Hilton created a range of brightly colored children’s socks with play value, to catch the shopper’s eye. It first launched a range of children’s socks under the Zoo Feet brand, with nine individual designs. It sold 200000 pairs in three months. Three months later, it discounted Zoo Feet and launched Sea Feet, with expectation of even higher sales. By year-end, Puppet Feet were introduced.

From the above example you can see that customers will look for new designs. They don’t want the old boring designs. However, marketing planning involves much more than independent decisions and assembling the parts into one marketing mix. The four P’s must be creatively blended so that the company develops the best overall mix for its target market.

The four P’s

Product – The product area is concerned with developing the right ‘product’ for the target market. This offering may involve a physical good, service or a blend of both. A product is not limited to a physical good. For example the product of a political party is the causes it works to achieve. The most important thing here is that the product satisfies the customers’ needs.
Place – This is concerned with all the decisions involved in getting the right product to the target market. It involves the availability of a product at a certain place when the customer wants it. A product is useless if it’s not available where the customer wants it. Usually the product reaches the customer through a channel of distribution. It is a series of businesses (or individuals) that participate in the flow of products from producer to final user or consumers.

Promotion – This involved communicating with the customers. Here you must inform the target market or others in the channel of distribution about the product. Promotion may include personal selling and other communication tools such as advertising or sales promotion. It is advised to blend these various methods.

Price – This is where the right price for the product is decided. You must consider the prices of your competition before setting the price and also must consider the cost of making the product. In addition, you should have some knowledge of the current practices involving mark-ups, discounts and other terms of sale in your region, because these vary according to regions of the country or between different countries.

Marketing Strategy Planning.

The marketing strategy specifies a target market and a related marketing mix. A target market can be described as a fairly homogeneous (similar) group of customers to whom a company wishes to appeal. And the marketing mix can be described as the controllable variables that the company puts together to satisfy a target group. These variables are the Product, Place, Price and Promotion. These four things are also known as the four P’s in marketing.

Developing an effective marketing strategy involves a process of selecting a specific target market and marketing mix that represents a real opportunity. This narrowing down process requires a thorough understanding of the market and a careful analysis of customers’ needs, the effects of current or prospective competitors, and the company’s own objectives and resources.

There are usually more alternative strategy options that a company can pursue and each has its advantages and disadvantages. Developing a set of specific qualitative and quantitative screening criteria to define the business and markets in which the company wants to compete may assist in eliminating probable strategies that are not well suited to the company. In this case the company can make a SWOT analysis, which will recognize and list the company’s strengths and weaknesses as well as opportunities and threats. It can help the company to focus on a strategy that capitalizes on strengths and takes advantage of opportunities, while avoiding threats and possibly redressing some weaknesses.

Value of the customer.

A customer may look at a market offering from two perspectives. One deals with the potential benefits of that offering and the other concerns what the customer has to give up to obtain those benefits. For example, consider someone who works at a very busy office who loves to take coffee breaks (don’t we all love those kinda breaks?). Our coffee loving, hard working friend might see this coffee break as a personal reward because he had worked so hard that day or even see this as a way to break the ice and get to know an attractive officemate. Clearly, there are different needs associated with these different benefits. The cost of acquiring these benefits would include the price of the coffee, but there might also be non monetary costs such as the time taken to travel to the coffee shop and the difficulty of finding a parking space near the coffee shop and also annoyance caused due to slow service.

As the above example suggests, both benefits and cost can take many different forms. Now we come to the concept of customer value (the difference between the benefits a customer sees from a market offering and the costs of obtaining those benefits). A customer is likely to be more satisfied when the customer value is higher, when benefits exceed costs by a larger margin. Someone who sees the costs as greater than the benefits is not likely to become a customer. A good or service that does not meet a customers needs result in a low customer value, even if the price is low.

The companies need to evaluate ways of improving the benefits, or reducing the costs, of what their company offers customers. However, customers do not stop and compute customer value scores before making a purchase. But it is the customers’ view that matters even if they have not consciously thought about it.

Marketing oriented organizations.

These organizations aim all of its efforts, in a coordinated manner, at simultaneously satisfying its customers and achieving its own corporate goals. Some managers show relatively little interest in customers needs and prefer to make products that are convenient to produce. This can be identified as a production oriented business.

These days’ successful organizations have moved away from production orientation and replaced with a marketing orientation. The advantages of adopting a marketing orientation may seem obvious, but many companies still follow a production orientation. Take for example a shop that is opened at odd hours or only opened for a limited number of hours, because the shop owner is busy or doing something else. But think about what times the customers prefer to shop. If the shop is closed during these times the business are going to lose the customers. They will go and look for another shop that is opened. So the satisfaction of customer is a very important factor in determining the success of a business.