posted by Admin on Mar 7
Marketing literature often has discussed the dilemma between standardization and adaptation in international operations. The incentives for standardizing marketing programs on a global basis are significant, e.g., lower unit design costs and easier monitoring of performance. Yet the international competitive road is littered with the remains of those that stood firmly against the challenge of local adaptation.
A recent study that looked into more than 200 cases of international “blunders” by United States companies bear witness to the dangers of a homogeneous strategy. Over 53 percent of all the blunders identified and documented by the researchers were in the marketing area. If consumer product industries were isolated from the rest of the sample, the incidence of marketing errors rose to over 75 percent. Most significantly, nearly all of these blunders occurred when the firm introduced one of its domestically successful products into a new foreign market. The lesson seems to be: beware of success lest it could your vision.
Whether or not adaptation is required, and ( more critically) to what extent, is a complex but vital decision falling squarely on the shoulders of the executive with responsibility for foreign market entry. A number of analytical frameworks have been suggested to assist him in his task. In all of these it appears that the transferability of a standard marketing package is dependent on the interrelationship between two factors: