Abstract:

One of the most striking trends in marketing in the last decade has been the growing importance of multinational companies. An increasing number of industries are working on a global or regional rather than on a national scale. The major task of the international marketing manager is twofold: - Designing marketing programs for many different markets and; - integrating all these national programs into effective, synergistic international marketing activities. The basic problem in these activities is in how far the same strategies can be applied in a number of markets or to what extent each market should be treated completely individually. This problem leads to two basic controversial dimensions in multinational marketing: A. headquarter control over local marketing decision making and; B. standardization of international marketing programs. Before looking further into these, let us first summarize the benefits of and obstacles to the standardization of multinational strategies - as published in books and articles that deal with this subject.