Global Marketing and Market Research

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

Definition:
It’s a form of business research and is generally divided into two categories: consumer market research and business-to business (B2B) market research. Basically consumer marketing research the buying habits of individual people while business-to-business marketing research investigates the markets for products sold by one business to another. [2]

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]#p#分页标题#e#

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
Not for all but for most of the companies worldwide, global marketing is not a revolutionary shift; it is an evolutionary process.
• Domestic marketing
Marketing restricted to the political boundaries of a country. Thus the company only has to consider domestic competition. Even if that competition includes companies from foreign markets, it still only has to focus on the competition that exists in its home market.
• Exporting Marketing
Generally, companies began exporting, reluctantly, to the occasional foreign customer who sought them out. At the very beginning of this stage, filling these orders was considered a burden, not an opportunity. If there was enough interest to gain from, companies became passive by hiring an export management company to deal with all the issues; other became direct exporters, creating exporting departments at headquarters.
• International Marketing
If the exporting departments are becoming successful but the costs of doing business from headquarters plus time differences, language barriers and cultural ignorance are hindering the company’s competitiveness in the foreign market, then offices could be built in the foreign countries. Sometimes companies usually buy firms in the foreign countries in order to take advantage of relationships, storefronts, factories, and personnel already there in place.
• Multinational Marketing
At the multi-national stage, the company is marketing its products and services in many courtiers around the world and wants to benefit from economies of scale.
E.g. Dell, Inc. Apple, Inc. Ford Motor Company
• Global Marketing
When a company becomes a global marketer, it views the world as one-market and creates products that will only require weeks to fit into any regional marketplace. Consulting with marketers in all the countries that will be affected makes marketing decisions. The goal is to sell the same thing the same way everywhere.
E.G.   Microsoft, Coca-Cola

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.#p#分页标题#e#
 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:
The price in the global market will always vary from market to market. Price is affected by many variables like cost of product development, cost of ingredients, cost of transportation and so on.
Place:
The distribution of the product is very important and is country-by-country decision influenced by the competition that is being offered to the target market. For example, Coca-Cola, not all cultures use vending machines to sell drinks like here in US, in India, it’s not.
Promotion:
Promotion, specifically, advertising, is generally the largest item accounts as a company’s budget. It is the process after product research, development and making. When dealing with promotion, global companies will seek a promotion strategy, which will reduce costs, minimize all the redundancies in processing and implementing, on the other hand, to increase the speed of the overall procedure. [1]

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.#p#分页标题#e#
• 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.
• Underutilization of domestic assets—to the extent that there are assets, facilities, and machinery in the United States that will now sit idle due to the foreign operation, those costs won’t go away. In addition, assets are now being underutilized, so the return on assets for your organization is going to go down. Unfortunately, unless the foreign operation is actually increasing overall revenue, your percentage cost of overhead will go up. In some cases, the domestic real estate may be worth less than the book value on the financial statements.[6] 
• Laws—have to notice that laws vary country to country.
• Natural risks—some natural uncertainties in the invested countries. [5]
• Exporting products and personnel when first establish markets; contacts and all the installation in the foreign countries might have risks.
• Cultural production taste—adjust the product to the local people’s taste, for example, McDonalds introduces spicy chicken sandwiches in some places in China where people love to eat spicy food.
Case on Coca-Cola
As the domestic markets mature, it’s becoming more and more fashionable for organizations to seek growth and more profit opportunities in foreign countries. Internet communication speed up the way people doing business compared to the traditional ways. More and more convenient transportation technologies allow business to be done in an even faster pace. People from different places worldwide can communication with each other quicker and more convenient in very efficient ways. The markets to target are growing dramatically day-by-day. Globalization has become the daily topic nowadays, compared with other successful global companies in the world; Coca-Cola has set a very good example for others who are aiming to go global.     
Background of Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola is the world largest manufacturer and distributor of non-alcoholic beverages. Established in US, Coca-Cola started its first global expansion in 1919 and now markets to more than 200 countries worldwide. It is competing with Pepsi in some overseas markets, particularly Asian Countries like China.
Its large portfolio of soft drink brands includes Schweppes, oasis, 5 alive, Kea Oar, Fanta, lilt, Dr Pepper, Sprite and PowerAde.
Global Marketing Strategy for Coca-Cola
• Converging customer needs and preferences—forcesUK thesis base#p#分页标题#e# of globalization driven by technology and wider travel are leading to more homogenized customers needs and wants worldwide. Building global brand identities where companies are able to export their domestic brands to mass markets abroad and consumers will react to them in similar ways. In this sense, Coca-Cola’s standardization marketing with a universal product and message can be a good solution. Coca-Cola sells virtually the same Coke beverage worldwide. The design of Coca-Cola soft drinks has changed little in its history, from its logo to the glass bottle. These unique and consistent characteristics brought it the strong image globally.
• Coca-Cola gains its economies though the competent running of the large-scale franchising system for its bottling operations, which differentiate with other companies’ strategy that they reap cost advantages by operating on a global scale and ultimately improve their all-round competitiveness.
• Coca-Cola has chosen to standardize its product and manufacturing process, which brings it great cost efficiencies that make it to survive globalization.
• Standardized products with different bottle sizes (same product with different bottles—make preference differences): SSRB (Standers size returnable bottle); LRB (Litter returnable bottle); NRB (No return bottle) or disposable bottle; PET 1.5 (1.5 litter plastic bottle); CANS (Tin pack 330ml). Different packing: 24 regular bottle shell; 6bottle pack for 1.5 pets; 12 bottles in a pack or disposable bottle; 2 cans in one pack. Those sizes differences bring the customers different preferences and convenience.
• Pricing strategy—Coca-Cola has trade promotion, which means it gives incentives to middle men or retailers in way a that they offer them free samples and free empty bottle, by this these retailers and middle man push their product in the market. And that’s why Coke seen more in the market. Seen as sold (seen more in the market that sells more). Coke changes their product prices according to the season because the sales in each season fluctuate.
• Consumer Diversity—consumers in different countries vary dramatically in their geographic, demographic, economic and cultural characteristics. They, thus, have differences in product preferences, uses, and attitudes, shopping patterns, income levels and education. Coca-Cola has tailored its products to suit local tastes and conditions. It used a standardized marketing campaign strategy where it could have some specific advertisements for specific markets different from common ad. Designs. But now Coca-Cola put its efforts to accommodate local culture and nuances and it launched the new ad in 2006 “Live on the Coke Side of Life” which including the local culture elements. It also offers a varied product line-up to capture different consumer tastes, for example, soy drinks for Asian markets.
• Coca-Cola is well know for its widespread accessibility though a variety of channels such as large supermarkets, petrol stations, restaurants, hospitals, cafes and so on. It describes itself as multi-local. #p#分页标题#e#
Coca-Cola’s local Marketing strategy enables Coke to listen to all the voices around the world asking for beverages that span the entire spectrum of tastes and occasions. What people want in a beverage is a reflection of who they are, where they live, how they work and play, and how they relax and recharge. Coca-Cola is trying target different people in different communities and different cultures and trying to become a good neighbor, who makes it to have billions of friends around the world.
Citation:
[1] Global marketing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_marketing  access on 4/10
[2] Marketing research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_research access on 4/10
[3] Global Marketing Strategies http://www.oppapers.com/essays/Global-Marketing-Strategies/136644 access on   4/11
[4] Domestic and Global Marketing Plans http://www.gradingrocket.com/essays/Business/Domestic+and+Global+Marketing+Plans/ access on 4/11
[5] Insuring the global risk--look beyond the basics http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3615/is_199608/ai_n8741812/  access on 4/11
[6] Going Global: The Risks and The Rewards  http://www.plantemoran.com/Services/Consulting/StrategyGlobalServices/Resources/Articles/Going+Global+The+Risks+and+the+Rewards.htm access on 4/12
[7] Coca-Cola’s Global Marketing strategy http://www.powerfulwords.co.uk/sample-assignments/global-marketing-cola-cola.php access on 4/12
[8] Coca-Cola Marketing strategy http://www.scribd.com/doc/10552013/Coca-Cola-Marketing-Strategies access on 4/13