Page 76 - GLOBAL STRATEGIC MARKETING

into five components: finding and satisfying global customers; identifying
global customer needs; satisfying global customers; being better than the

competition; and co-ordinating marketing activities. In addition, global
strategy is defined as the competitive advantage arising from location,
scale economics, or global brand distribution. Companies that operate on

a global scale need to integrate their worldwide operations by developing
a co-ordinated global marketing strategy that delivers the needs of global

customers and recognises the need to develop sustainable competitive
advantage. It is important to investigate the economic, technological,
political and socio-cultural forces that shape global marketing strategy as

they also provide the background for the formulation and implementation
of an international marketing strategy. The unit outlined the international

strategic process, which includes four interrelated elements and the
assessment of the internal strengths and weaknesses of a company and
the need to gain a competitive advantage based on Porter’s Generic

Strategies (Porter, 1985). Future areas of prime importance highlighted
the role of technology which is discussed fully in Unit 12: Enabling

implementation through technology.

January 2013

The changes to marketing are not only strategic, but deep in detail. Shifting one's
perspective from pushing out campaigns to helping customers throughout their
decision journeys immediately raises the issue of cross-functional coordination
across marketing, sales, and service -- as well as how it all integrates into the brand's
core offering itself. Digital interactions require significant analytic support to develop
the algorithms that push the right content to the right interaction point. Social media
requires real-time decision-making based on unstructured data, often executed
through people on the front lines of interaction. Mobile requires coordinating an
astoundingly wide array of parties — telecom carriers, media providers, operating
system owners — as well as personal, contextual, and location-based data to drive
any kind of scaled engagement program. Generating the growing mountain of
content to power all of these interactions requires supply-chain type discipline.

Putting the right capabilities in place will not only help brands develop the right
interaction strategies; it will give them a broader range of options that they can
execute. The pressure for operational leadership now shifts to marketing and sales.
Creativity is no longer delivered in simple advertisements; it requires multifaceted