Page 207 - Marketing the Basics 2nd

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gLoBaL Marketing
The World Is Flat is the title of a best selling book by Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and pundit on globalization. Perhaps he does get a bit carried away but certainly if not flat the world is certainly much more accessible to marketers today than twenty years ago. This is a two-edged sword – we get to sell in other countries but they also get to turn up the competitive heat for us in our home markets. Not that we have much of a choice – foreign competitors are increasingly the reality. In this chapter we will focus on the opportunity that competing in foreign markets offers.
FIRST DECISIONS
The starting point for firms seriously considering whether they should market outside their home country is whether they have more attractive opportunities still available in their home market before they go to the considerable cost of going elsewhere – and it is expensive to market elsewhere. We’ll talk more about those costs shortly. So, the first question is why go overseas? We call it overseas even if it is next door, for instance a German firm selling in France, where clearly there is no sea involved. English expressions, go figure. The most common reason is that you have saturated your home market and additional growth will be expensive to achieve.