Free International Marketing Management Essay Sample

International marketing management is a management whereby a marketing firm sets marketing principles on how to market the products to other countries. A marketing firm may employ marketing decisions across the national boundaries.  International marketing acquires standardized approach to global markets and aims upon sameness, e.g. similarities in segments and consumers. The principles involve tracing various components of marketing the products to the global market (Eliasberg, 1997).

Stephen (1993) confirmed that marketing research departments have to gather information on the global markets. This information include; country's political stability, geographical characteristics, cultural attributes and taxation rates. This helps in accessing and identifying good foreign markets. Political stability, cultural and sociological climates are non-economic factors but can affect the division's business.  This can also affect the ecology, leisure time, safety, and then potential impact of the division's business. Political instability in the country is a great problem that affects the daily duties of the researchers. When a country is politically instable, product production will be affected and the research will not be carried out. For example, cotton in Sudan was no longer doing well because of political instability. The Sudan government was not in a position to solve the financial need of the researchers to undertake research both externally and internally. Moreover, researchers face financial problems (Gerstner & James, 1995).

The growth of economy, business cycle trends, inflation and the profitability analysis of the country's product are other complexities faced by the researchers. Market researcher encounter problems in solving problems related to inflation and change in economic change. Inflation makes the prices of commodities to change. Change in prices of a given commodity posses possibility of losses. Researchers also encounter various problems in convincing consumers. Researchers have to potentially cause the consumers to do something very different from would do without research. The research causes the consumers to adopt different methods now or after sometime. The researcher has to force the consumer to change their objectives and to adopt new ways of solving problems.
New markets in the industrialized countries are highly becoming integrated geographically, creating direct vertical link and information flows between the retailer, suppliers, and customers. This compels the researchers to conduct research across country boundaries so as to identify international market segments and to target opportunities for integrating and co-coordinating better strategies across their national boundaries (Chuck and Mark, 1995).  On the other hand, collection and interpretation of results from different and geographically diverse sources should be imperative for it to expect market change and come up with effective strategies.

Change in global environment and technological advances in data dissemination, collection and analysis shows that the researchers will have to widen their strength in order to implement, interpret and design research that will corresponds the new technology of the 21st century. Due to efforts aligned to match the markets with highest potentials, researchers will have to obtain new mechanism and skills in order to design and conduct research. The new technology strains the researchers as in interpreting and integrating complex data from different environments and diverse sources. Critical interpretation is required in order to provide accurate recommendations for the firms.

Due to the spanning diverse environment, the researchers will have to develop mechanisms to cope with the changing market situation. International market researchers also need to come up with new skills, thoughtful and imaginative approaches to correspond with the new markets (Demski &Zimmerman, 2000). The advance in qualitative research and techniques compels the researchers to develop the new ways of interpreting and understanding the new trends in a sparse cultural context. Advances research will require the researchers to understand the purchase and consumption context, as well as ways of interpreting the results of research and foreseeing the future changes and trends.

Marketing researchers will have to look for better ways of harnessing the new technologies in order conduct research and upheld its value (Gupta & Richard, 2003). On the other hand, research companies and organizations have to develop new skills of conducting simultaneous research in both industrialized and developing countries. Researchers also need to strain hard to obtain market for the international marketers designing and selling international brands. Timely, marketing research becomes tedious and more critical for most firms, which compete, in the current centaury.

Collecting international marketing data is also a great problem facing researchers. These problems have relatively raised a lot of attention in the international marketing literature. This problems are of two types; administrative and conceptual. Administrative problem involve lack of sophistications in market research services overseas, which may also generate more problems. An example of this problem is a situation whereby trained interviewers or research personnel may not be available to carry out surveys and facilities may not be available to facilitate experience. Moreover, law level of education and cultural attitudes towards research may also create difficulties in getting survey data. Lack of secondary also may impede sampling procedures.

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More significant perhaps, and conceptually, research techniques are susceptible to the possibility of cultural bias. Possibilities of miscommunication and misinterpretation of data occur more frequently due to cultural differences that arise (Gupt & Richard, 2003). This problem occurs since then researchers typically come from different cultural environment. Researchers will tend to analyze the behavior in terms of his or her background, rather than that under investigation. Data may also be interpreted incorrectly due to questionnaire that may not have been well phrased or defined. This will require a need for explicit procedures to isolate possible sources of bias and the use of research techniques that are less susceptible to bias (David, 2000).

Data collection procedures that were developed for the collection of data on buyer perceptions and preferences in connection with the recent developments in non-metric multidimensional scaling techniques are to a large extent culture free. Customers are not allowed to interpret their own mental processes but to merely behave by ranking a set of pictorial and verbal stimuli according to their similarities and preferences. Thus, response Bias may be explicitly examined. The emphasis in international marketing research on difficulties of data collection led to a negligence of the analytical procedures to be use in analyzing data. International consumer studies have utilized cross tabulation and simple statistic methods such as mean and standard deviation methods (Ganesh, 1998).

Demski &Zimmerman (2000) asserts that there has been lack of systematic studies of customers' feelings preferences, nature, and determinants in different parts of the world. This has largely precluded the examination of the validity of these assumptions based on research. Only scattered marketing studies on consumer behavior in selected countries have been undertaken despite the various behavioral science studies on the behavior of people from various countries. Particularly there has been a comparative study allowing any direct comparisons concerning consumer behavior in different countries. The basic psychological processes such as perception, cognition, learning, and motivation are universal, one may hypothesize that consumer response will tend to be equal in different countries (Demski &Zimmerman, 2000). All human beings irrespective of the nationality are hunger-driven, thirst and self-esteem. Anthropological studies and assumptions state that consumers behave the same worldwide regardless of where they are. However, psychological processes are universal. Environmental factors such as economic-technological variables and cultural patterns regulate response patterns within a given society (Mark, 1995). Therefore, the existence of similar cognitive stages does not necessarily refer to common behavioral patterns.

There has been absence of detailed empirical studies on the behavior of international consumers and emphasis on the importance of environmental and particularly cultural variables that has led many surveyors to subscribe to the next model and generalization (Rialp, 2004). The similar observations on foreign consumer, emphasizes differences between the researchers' behavior and behavior of the consumer in the home country. This is an implication of a stereotyped national character that will definitely reflect the basic assumption that buyers in every country have a homogeneous idiosyncratic set of features. Behavioral science analysis suggests however that the peoples' behavior in any given country is heterogeneous (Rialp, 2004). This almost conquers with the sociologists and psychologists' behavior, which suggests that different social classes and social groups, as well as those with different personalities, have different interests, behavioral patterns and styles.

International marketing researchers face serious problems related to small scale bribery (Rudolf & Pervez, 2009). This means that the researchers are always compelled to pay small sum of money to the foreign officials in exchange in order for him/her violating some official duty and to speed the routine government actions. There also has been Large Scale Bribery whereby relatively large payments are made to allow violation of the law (Jain, 2003). It is also intended to influence policy directly or indirectly.  Researchers also face problems related to unfair differential pricing. A buyer may request a written invoice showing the price of the item other than the actual price paid to force out dumping goods with prices bellow that in their local markets.

 

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