Tasks Of The International Marketer

Introduction

In our increasingly global society, many companies cannot afford to live with the illusion that their domestic markets will always be strong. Therefore, companies choose to market overseas as well. This then makes the international marketer’s task more complicated as he now has to deal with two levels of uncontrollable uncertainty instead of one. Besides the uncontrollable elements of the domestic environment, he has to deal with each foreign country’s unique uncontrollable factors as well.

Although the research process and methods are basically the same whether applied in Johannesburg, Mozambique or Transkei, International marketing research involves two additional complications:

1. Information will need to be communicated across cultural boundaries.

2. The environments within which the research tools are applied are often different in foreign markets.

We can divide our research required, into 3 areas:

• General – regarding the country, area, market

• Information regarding future forecasts anticipated through economic, consumer,

industry trends within particular markets/countries.

• Precise market information, to develop the product, promotion, distribution or pricing decisions.

An extensive scope is needed for foreign research, due to higher levels of uncertainty associated with it. A country’s political stability, cultural attributes, and geographical characteristics, are not ordinary types of information gathered for the domestic market, but are essential for a sound assessment of foreign markets.

The following are a few complications warranting an in-depth investigation and understanding, so as to increase foreign market trade, instead of decreasing demand unintentionally.

Secondary Data

In many countries, there has been extensive research and data collection conducted for many years already, such as America, Japan. Unfortunately there are just as many countries who have only initiated data collection recently. Organizations such as United Nations and other private/public groups, fund the collection of information to offset the lack of inclusive data.

Even with the extensive amount of data that’s been collected, one of the major hiccups is its availability to other countries. Detailed data such as number of whole salers, retailers, manufacturers, facilitating services, are unavailable for many parts of the world. Data on population and income are also mostly unavailable. If required, marketers need to initiate their own research or rely on private sources.

Even when the data is available, the researcher needs to be fluent in the language it’s provided in or have a native speaker of the appropriate language on the team.

Our next concern relating to available data, is how reliable are they? Official statistics are sometimes too optimistic or unreliable in reporting relevant economic data regarding their countries.