International Marketing

Abstract

International Marketing (IM) has grown out of the limitations of traditional international trade theory in front of the emergence of multinational companies, the increased integration of world markets, and the globalization of consumption. There are different ways of defining IM: (a) a broad view emphasizing foreign market operations and the development of foreign channels, IM being near to international business; (b) a restricted view emphasizing the design of marketing strategies for foreign markets and the co-ordination of strategies across markets. In this sense, IM is based on marketing categories, that is consumer behavior, market research, and 4Ps applied to international operations (this view is adopted by the article); and (c) IM can also be seen as the gradual internationalization process of marketing knowledge, whereby marketing concepts and practices developed in the United States are adopted progressively worldwide. The central debate in IM is whether products, and more generally marketing strategies, need to be customized to each individual market, at the expense of economies of scale and global coherence, or whether they should become standardized with global co-ordination, at the expense of meeting unique features of local consumer environments. The article explains how compromises between these two opposite policies can be made as concerns the physical, service, and symbolic attributes of products (such as brands). The article also explains how cross-cultural studies have emerged in IM since the 1980s as concerns consumer behavior—consumption still being largely a local reality—and market research, with increasing attention to cross-cultural equivalence of concepts, instruments, and data collection procedures. This approach has an influence on the design of international marketing strategies and is illustrated with examples.