Professor A’ Deak
Global Perspective on Technology
Individual Presentation Mini-Report
Global Marketing and Market Research
Marketing research (Market research)

Definition:

Characteristics of Marketing Research & Importance
We know that the task for doing the marketing research is to provide management with relevant, accurate, reliable, valid and current information. Marketing managers make numerous strategic and tactical decisions in the process of identifying and satisfying customer needs. They make decision about potential opportunities, target market selection, market segmentation, planning and implementing marketing programs, marketing performance, and control. These decisions are complicated by interactions between the controllable marketing variables of product, pricing, promotion, and distribution. There are further complications are added by uncontrollable environmental factors such as general economic conditions, technology, public policies and laws, political environment, competition and social and cultural changes. Another factor in this mix is the complexity of consumers. Marketing research helps the marketing manager link the marketing variables with the changing environment and the consumers. It also helps to remove some of the uncertainty by providing relevant information about the marketing variables, environment, and consumers.
There are two major characteristics of marketing research. Firstly, it’s systematic. This characteristic is required for all of the processes in the marketing research. Marketing research should be objective in the second place. It should be able to provide accurate information that reflects a true state of affairs.[2]
Marketing research is quite important to companies to conduct since it is the very good way to get to understand what happens in the industry, what’s the new technology comes out and the current trend in the industry to get ideas to learn and know what do customers really need and want.

Marketing Research Methods
There are two major marketing research Methods including:
Qualitative Marketing Research—small number o respondents like focus groups, in-depth interviews.
Quantitative Marketing Research—used to draw conclusions, test a specific hypothesis, which involves a large number of respondents like surveys and questionnaires.

International Marketing Research
When dealing with the international Marketing Research, it also follows the same path as the domestic marketing research but may have some differences in some specific aspects. In the international markets, customers may have different customs, cultures, and expectations from the same company. So secondary information should be collected from each of the separate countries and then combined or compared with each other. It must be a time consuming and complicated work. A saying “when come to Roma, dress like the Roman” explains this situation in a very exact way. [2]

Global Marketing:

Definition:
The Oxford University Press defines global marketing as “marketing on a worldwide scale reconciling or taking commercial advantage of global operational differences, similarities and opportunities in order to meet global objectives” (Oxford University Press definition) [1]

The evolutions of Marketing

Factors that affect Global Marketing
There are many external environmental factors: political, cultural and technological factors that affect marketing both domestic and global marketing. We know that the political environment can be very complicated and changeable; the political factors can directly affect a company or even the entire industry. As for the cultural factor, when companies are facing the global market, they are facing different countries and thus different cultures. They have to adapt their products to the local culture in order to gain that market. They cannot just have the same product to serve all the cultures around the world. [3] In addition, technological factor plays a very important factor in the decision making in the global marketing because when dealing with the global market, there are much more competitors ever than dealing with the domestic market. In order to gain market share, companies need to be innovative and have new technologies to reduce cost and lower their price and get to know their market and customer better than their competitors do so as to be profitable.
And it’s of course there are internal environmental factors that matter—the Four P’s: product, price, place, and promotion are always affected as companies though the five evolutionary phases to become global company.
Product:
A global company is one that can create a single product and only have to tweak elements for different markets. For example, Coca-Cola uses two types: one is with sugar; one is with corn syrup for all of its markets. Product packaging in every country is almost the same in some way, shape or form; however, the bottle or can also includes the country’s native language and is the same size as other drinks bottles or cans in that specific country.
Price:

Risks dealing with Global Marketing

• More fierce competition worldwide—when going global, that means one has to deal with more competitors in the same industry both from its original country and the country it’s getting into. There is a very real possibility that other companies could duplicate your products or processes and that, as a foreign company, you may be unable to prevent it or recover your losses.
• Substitute products—there might be products that are already very popular in the target country the company wants to step into, and that product is the similar kind of product as the new product the company is planning to introduce to the country.
• Cultural communication & management issues—personnel and management team choosing. Local employee training in order to enhance the overall effectiveness. If you’re going to operate in China, the supply chain has extended itself as far as it possibly can geographically. This distance elicits a variety of shipping concerns and time constraints. If your product is susceptible to changes in volume or product design, inventory in transit could become obsolete due to these changes. There are also significant time differences and differences in communication styles. Managing international supply chains requires a completely different skill set than managing supply chains within the United States—you have to address shipping, warehousing, customs, and tax issues, as well as the timing of inventory in transit. This makes your manufacturing process less flexible due to volume and design changes.
• Pricing issues—design different pricing for different countries and cultures which according to the local situation. For example, since people will have different level of salaries, the pricing should be adjusted to local people’s economic situation accordingly.
• Joint venture risks—when companies are going globally though participation in joint ventures, there might have risks when dealing with the financial relationships with the foreign companies.
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