International Marketing

Course details

This course is about power. It will show how the small players can have power in a world of business giants. In the past, only large companies could successfully consider marketing internationally. Coke, one of the largest, spends 1.5 billion in marketing support. But even for giants like Coke, the challenges of selling a commodity in the global market have become so great that being large is no longer enough. Scale and direct power has become so important that we are seeing mergers of multinationals into global companies in key fields such as communications, auto manufacturing, banking, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals.

We will explore a new set of rules for global marketing that empowers the small and the innovative. We will see how this new set of rules has emerged based on how nature itself works. We will see how this new metamorphosis is transforming power throughout the world.

Course Objectives:

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Understand the new global business environment
• Analyze individual and group behavior - the heart of the new marketing strategy
• Understand the rules of the new organization - the shift from the centralized machine (commodity) model to the distributed organic (information) model

BLI’s Quote:

• "Look critically at your marketing budget. Then choose, from the whole global marketplace, the regions or market sectors which are likely to be the most fertile for you. Concentrate your marketing resources there. But don't choose more territory than you have the resources to nourish... and to harvest."

Course Outline:

The New Global Business Environment

• The impact of the new technology on markets and societies
• Historic parallels showing how new sets of technology have previously transformed economic and political relationships
• Current key demographic, customer, market, and environmental trends
• The risks and opportunities in the developing world where most of the people live but where none of the western business environments exist
• The risks and opportunities of the developed world where a demographic revolution and a shift in consumer consciousness is occurring
• Regulations (barriers or opportunities) and the impact of economic nationalism
• Financing a new revolution in the developed and developing world

1. Partnerships
2. The network effect
3. Microcredit

Individual and Group Behavior

• How ideas spread and how an idea or a product becomes popular
• How people are segmented into psychographic categories
• The importance of aligning the values in your product/service and your organization to the values of your customer segment
• Brandings: the relationship between the provider and the consumer

The Rules of the New Organization

• The limits of the commodity/product/power approach
• Things versus relationships: how the new science underpins the new business
• The meaning of the service/solution/network alternative
• Team and network roles
• The meaning of core competency and partnerships
• The meaning of intellectual capital and the role of culture in an organization’s ability to innovate and respond effectively to shifts in its environment and key relationships
• The importance of values and values alignment in the new model
• The role of channels
• The new network organization: how small can be both beautiful and powerful