International marketing strategies and practices

International Marketing

The beginning of the introduction is a bit clumsy, but this is a style issue and not material to the paper. The subject is introduced well. The authors do a good job of framing the problem. It is easy to understand that the debate is between two options that are essentially mutually exclusive in using a consistent global marketing program vs. tailoring the marketing program for each country or culture. The authors explain their methodology well, and it is easy to understand as the reader. The brevity and lack of tangential rambling in the introduction is appreciated.

The objective of the study is to synthesize the existing body of literature. This body is extensive, and the authors believe that there have been very few direct comparisons between the two international marketing approaches. Their aim is to bridge that gap in the research, so that there is more of a direct comparison. Logically, this is sound. All areas of research benefit from such analyses every once in a while, to ensure that scholars and practitioners alike can easily digest the current state of the research.

The methodology is sound. Inherently, there are a lot of different variables that will come into play and affect the results of marketing strategies. For the most part, however, those variables are going to be roughly the same for most marketers. Distilling these variables down to elements that the firm can control, such as elements of the marketing mix, is a good approach. Just as important, the variables that the authors have chosen to operationalize here are all supported by the literature. The authors performed their meta-analysis on research from respected marketing journals, which boosts the quality of this paper. Since a meta-analysis is always going to be a GIGO situation, the use of respected journals is essential to deriving quality results. There is little to argue with respect to the statistical analysis that the authors utilized.

3. The authors found that the literature does not support the localization of elements of the marketing mix. The authors support this finding quantitatively, but I feel that they make a mistake in juxtaposing the two elements of localization and standardization as either/or decisions. They specifically argue against the common thought that some tailoring to the needs of local markets is required, noting that there is insufficient quantitative support for such views. However, the degree of changes was never taken into account. For example, they appear to be arguing that wholesale changes are ineffective in order to refute the argument that minor tweaks are desirable. Their study is not so sensitive or fine-tuned as to differentiate between the two approaches, so they inherently take an all or nothing stance. In the real world, however, this is not an all or nothing decision. As such, they maybe stretch their findings a little too thin in trying to argue against any changes -- if no changes was always the best choice then their test scores would be closer to zero. Their test scores, instead, are averages, based on a broad sample. But averages do not apply to all situations evenly. So the authors should have approach that conclusion with a little bit more caution, reflecting that a statistical "yes" or "no" decision based on a perceived binary choice may not be perfectly adaptable to a real world where the choice exists not as a binary one but as one of many along a continuum.

The authors did find some link between market position factors and outcomes, although the link was weak. The authors made a small error in this section when referring to the =35 fail safe, in that they implied cherry-picking 35 studies with an effect size of zero would change the results. The studies should not be cherry-picked, however. The real odds here are the odds that an additional 35 studies would all have an effect size of zero, and those odds are much lower. This error is not critical to the paper, but the argument should be reconsidered.

4. The findings support localized advertising. This is not particularly surprising, and combined with the recommendations to standardize the other elements, this reflects a popular approach among companies doing business internationally. For practitioners, this research is valuable because it shows where they should concentrate their localization efforts. In real life, there is no binary decision, but firms can choose the degree to which they should localize elements of their marketing strategy. This paper helps companies to understand where the changes made will be most effective, allowing firms to improve their ROI by investing in the changes that are going to have the most positive impacts.