Reading: Changes in Promotion

Local languages, colors, and religious beliefs all impact how global marketers promote their products and services in different countries.

KEY TAKEAWAY

To successfully implement global marketing strategies, brands must ensure their promotional campaigns take into account how consumer behavior is shaped by internal conditions and external influences.
Global companies must be nimble enough to adapt changing local market trends, tastes, and needs to their promotional mix.
When launching global advertising, public relations or sales campaigns, global companies test promotion ideas to provide results that are comparable across countries.
Using measures can be particularly helpful for marketers since they are based on visual, not verbal, elements of the promotion.

Terms

Measure: To ascertain the quantity of a unit of material via calculated comparison with respect to a standard.
Demographics: The observable characteristics of a population, such as physical traits, economic traits, occupational traits, and more.

Changes in Promotion

Before a company decides to become global, it must consider a multitude of factors unique to the international marketing environment. These factors are social, cultural, political, legal, competitive, economic, and even technological in nature. Ultimately, at the global marketing level, a company trying to speak with one voice is faced with many challenges when creating a worldwide marketing plan. Unless a company holds the same position against its competition in all markets (market leader, low cost, etc.), it is impossible to launch identical marketing plans worldwide. Thus, global companies must be nimble enough to adapt to changing local market trends, tastes, and needs.

Language is usually one element that is customized in a global promotional mix.

For global advertisers, there are four potentially competing business objectives that must be balanced when developing worldwide advertising: building a brand while speaking with one voice, developing economies of scale in the creative process, maximizing local effectiveness of advertisements, and increasing the company’s speed of implementation. Global marketers can use the following approaches when executing global promotional programs: exporting executions, producing local executions, and importing ideas that travel.

Factors in Global Promotion

To successfully implement these approaches, brands must ensure their promotional campaigns take into how consumer behavior is shaped by internal conditions (e.g., demographics, knowledge, attitude, beliefs) and external influences (e.g., culture, ethnicity, family, lifestyle) in local markets.

Language – The importance of language differences is extremely crucial in global marketing, as there are almost 3,000 languages in the world. Language differences have caused many problems for marketers in designing advertising campaigns and product labels. Language becomes even more significant if a country’s population speaks several languages.
Colors – Colors also have different meanings in different cultures. For example, in Egypt, the country’s national color of green is considered unacceptable for packaging because religious leaders once wore it. In Japan, black and white are colors of mourning and should not be used on a product’s package. Similarly, purple is unacceptable in Hispanic nations because it is associated with death.
Values – An individual’s values arise from his or her moral or religious beliefs and are learned through experiences. For example, Americans place a very high value on material well-being and are much more likely to purchase status symbols than people in India. In India, the Hindu religion forbids the consumption of beef.
Business norms – The norms of conducting business also vary from one country to the next. For example, in France, wholesalers do not like to promote products. They are mainly interested in supplying retailers with the products they need.
Religious beliefs – A person’s religious beliefs can affect shopping patterns and products purchased in addition to his or her values. In the United States and other Christian nations, Christmas time tends to be a major sales period. In other religions, significant religious holidays may or may not serve as popular times for purchasing products.

There are many other factors, including a country’s political or legal environment, monetary circumstances, and technological environment that can impact a brand’s promotional mix. Companies have to be ready to quickly respond and adapt to these challenges as they evolve and fluctuate in the market of each country.

Changing the Global Promotional Mix

When launching global advertising, public relations or sales campaigns, global companies test promotional ideas using marketing research systems that provide results comparable across countries. The ability to identify the elements or moments of an advertisement that contribute to the success of a product launch or expansion is how economies of scale are maximized in marketing communications. Market research measures such as flow of attention, flow of emotion, and branding moments provide insight into what is working in an advertisement in one or many countries. These measures can be particularly helpful for marketers since they are based on visual, not verbal, elements of the promotion.

Considering these measures along with conducting extensive market research is essential to determining the success of promotional tactics in any country or region. Once brands discover what works (and what does not) in their promotional mix, those ideas can be imported by any other market. Likewise, companies can use this intelligence to modify various elements in their promotional mix that are receiving minimal or unfavorable response from global audiences.

GLOSSARY

Advertisement

A commercial solicitation designed to sell some commodity or service.

Advertising

Communication for the purpose of influencing potential customers about products and services. A form of communication for marketing and used to encourage or persuade an audience (viewers, readers or listeners; sometimes a specific group) to continue or take some new action.

Attitude

A positive or negative evaluation of people, objects, events, or ideas in one’s environment an expression of favor or disfavor toward a person, place, thing, or event (the attitude object). Prominent psychologist Gordon Allport once described attitude as, “the most distinctive and indispensable concept in contemporary social psychology.” Disposition or state of mind.

Belief

Mental acceptance of a claim as truth regardless of supporting or contrary empirical evidence.

Brand

A name, symbol, logo, or other item used to distinguish a product, service, or its provider. The reputation of an organization, a product, or a person among some segment of the population.

Branding

This process involves researching, developing, and implementing brand names, brand marks, trade characters, and trademarks. A business’s ability to communicate a specific image, generally one that will entice consumers.

Consumer

Someone who acquires goods or services for direct use or ownership rather than for resale or use in production and manufacturing. The consumer is the one who pays to consume the goods and services produced. As such, consumers play a vital role in the economic system of a nation. In the absence of their effective demand, the producers would lack a key motivation to produce, which is to sell to consumers.

Consumer Behavior

The study of individuals, groups, or organizations and the processes they use to select, secure, and dispose of products, services, experiences, or ideas to satisfy needs; and the impacts that these processes have on the consumer and society.

Communication

The concept or state of exchanging information between entities. an instance of information transfer; a conversation or discourse the concept or state of exchanging data or information between entities.

Culture

The beliefs, values, behavior and material objects that constitute a people’s way of life; the arts, customs, and habits that characterize a particular society or nation. The sum of learned beliefs, values, and customs that regulate the behavior of members of a particular society. The arts, customs, and habits that characterize a particular society or nation. The language and peculiarities of a geographical location. A culture is the combination of the language that you speak and the geographical location you belong to. The distinct ways that people living in different parts of the world classified and represented their experiences.

Demographic

A characteristic used to identify people within a statistical framework. A demographic criterion: a characteristic used to classify people for statistical purposes, such as age, race, or gender. A characteristic used to classify people for statistical purposes, such as age, race, or gender. A grouping of people for statistical purposes, based as age, race, gender, etc.

Economies of scale

A process where an increase in quantity will result in a decrease of average cost of production (per unit). The characteristics of a production process in which an increase in the scale of the firm causes a decrease in the long run, average cost of each unit. The cost advantages that an enterprise obtains due to expansion. As the scale of output is increased, factors such as facility size and usage levels of inputs cause the producer’s average cost per unit to fall. The characteristics of a production process in which an increase in the scale of the firm causes a decrease in the long run average cost of each unit.

Global marketing

Global marketing is marketing on a worldwide scale, reconciling or taking commercial advantage of global operational differences, similarities and opportunities in order to meet global objectives.

Market

A group of potential customers for one’s product. One of the many varieties of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations and infrastructures whereby parties engage in exchange.

Marketing

The process of communicating the value of a product or service to customers. The promotion, distribution and selling of a product or service; includes market research and advertising.

Marketing environment

The factors and forces that affect a firm’s ability to build and maintain successful relationships with customers.

Market research (also called marketing research)

The function that links the consumers, customers, and public to the marketer through information. This information is used to identify and define marketing opportunities and problems; generate, refine, and evaluate marketing actions; monitor marketing performance; and improve understanding of marketing as a process. The systematic collection and evaluation of data regarding customers’ preferences for actual and potential products and services.

Marketing strategy

A process that can allow an organization to concentrate its resources on the optimal opportunities with the goals of increasing sales and achieving a sustainable competitive advantage

Process

A series of events to produce a result, especially as contrasted to product. in reference to capabilities, a process is how the capability is executed.

Product

Any tangible or intangible good or service that is a result of a process and that is intended for delivery to a customer or end user. Anything, either tangible or intangible, offered by the firm as a solution to the needs and wants of the consumer; something that is profitable or potentially profitable; goods or a service that meets the requirements of the various governing offices or society.

Promotion

The advancement of an employee’s rank or position in an organizational hierarchy system.Promotion represents all of the methods of communication that a marketer may use to provide information to different parties about the product. Promotion comprises elements such as: advertising, public relations, personal selling and sales promotion. dissemination of information about a product, product line, brand, or company.

Public

People. Includes people who look, think, and act the same as well as those who do not.

Public relations (PR)

The practice of managing the flow of information between an individual or an organization and the public.

Retailer

One who purchases goods or products in large quantities from manufacturers directly or through a wholesale, and then sells smaller quantities to the consumer for a profit.

Service

Action or work that is produced, then traded, bought or sold, and then finally consumed.

Strategy

A plan of action intended to accomplish a specific goal.

Tactics

The achievement of objectives through strategy.

Trend

An inclination in a particular direction the long-term movement in time series data after other components have been accounted for.

Value

The degree of importance given to something. A value is extremely absolute or relative ethical value, the assumption of which can be the basis for ethical action. A customer’s perception of relative price (the cost to own and use) and performance (quality).

Wholesaler

A person or company that sells goods wholesale is a middleman that buys its merchandise from a third party supplier and resells the merchandise to retail businesses or the end consumer. A wholesaler normally does not sell to other wholesalers.

Module 15: Erecting a Billboard in Tiananmen Square: Global Marketing