Multinational Marketing

Multinational marketing involves the domestic firm extending its products into multiple foreign markets. Multinational marketing examines the discrete differences between domestic and foreign markets. These foreign markets in many cases operate differently than the domestic markets. Firms have to account for another tier of marketing attributes to understand the foreign market. Several factors make the environment for multinational marketing more complex. The marketer has to initially recognize that each country is a sovereign entity. Basically, the country decides how it is to be run without any direct intervention from another country. The country is run in a manner that accommodates the government's political interest. The government has an overbearing influence over the environmental factors that affect a firm marketing in a foreign country. First and foremost, a firm must obtain [Page 1462]permission from the government to either produce and/or sell a good in the country. So for a firm to be engaged in multinational marketing, it must know how to operate within another type of framework. The factors that shape this new framework can be broken down into categories that involve but are not limited to social, political, legal, economic, governmental, cultural, language, customs, and topological factors. These factors help institutionalize the characteristics of the country, and the firm must adapt to these principles by learning how these factors affect the delivery of marketing goods to consumers.

In many ways, marketing products globally is the same as marketing them at home. Regardless of which part of the world the firm sells in, the marketing program must be centered on a sound product or service that is properly priced, promoted, and distributed to a carefully selected target market. In other words, the marketing manager has the same controllable decision variables in both domestic and nondomestic markets. Although the development of a multinational marketing program may be the same in either domestic or nondomestic markets, special problems are encountered during the implementation of marketing programs in nondomestic markets. These problems often arise because of the environmental differences that exist among various countries that marketing managers may be unfamiliar with.

In examining the differences between countries, the marketer must focus on how the consumer buying behavior is affected by the environmental forces. Many of these factors create distance between how the firm currently markets versus what can be done in the new environment. The environmental factors change the buying behavior and pressure the firm into revisiting its strategy for marketing in a new market. Sometimes the market changes so much that the firm has to rethink its entire strategic approach to entering the market. Although the traditional marketing mix factors of price, place, promotion, and product still reign as the most important factors in marketing, their emphasis changes when engaging in multinational marketing. The global factors actually affect how these marketing mix elements are used by the marketer. The global factors in most cases change the good that is delivered to the consumer. This directly limits the firm from being able to extend its goodwill previously established in the good's original form.

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