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paid communication of company messages through impersonal media.
The messages may be audio, as in radio; visual, as in billboards or

magazines; or audiovisual, as in television or cinema advertising (Terpstra
and Sarathy, 2000, p. 448). Promotion is aimed at selling products,
developing the image of the company and telling potential customers and

the market about your product. Terpstra and Sarathy (2000) indicate that
a company’s advertising programme is determined by two sets of

constraints, one posed by the internal situation of the company and the
other by the international environment.

8.6 Elements of the international environment and communication

Terpstra and Sarathy (2000) show that language differences are very
important in advertising. Although some languages, such as Arabic, are

used in more than one country, there are many more languages than
countries. Fortunately, advertisers do not have to know all languages, but

the message has to take on the local ‘fingerprint’; in other words, the
message should ‘speak’ the local language. Local help is of two kinds:
national personnel in countries where the firm has subsidiaries, and

advertisers and the advertising agency located in the market. In either
case, the company gets the benefit of employees in whose language the

company wants to advertise. In other markets, the firm may rely on its
distributor for advertising. Government regulations can affect the media,
the message, budget and agency ownership. The advertising of some

products, such as tobacco, alcohol and drugs, is limited by government
regulation. There is also the fact that advertising messages have a variety

of restrictions in relation to the language that can be used. Many countries
are limited on competitive advertising, and other countries require pre-
clearance of certain advertising (Terpstra and Sarathy, 2000). Moreover,

the medium used at home may not be available overseas, limiting
commercials on radio or TV. The communication infrastructure may not

help. Newspaper availability, for example, ranges widely from one daily
paper per 2% of the population in Japan and 1% in the USA, to a range of
one newspaper per 10–20% in Latin America. Companies can also

consider competition as another variable. In some markets, international