Abstract:

The increasing pace of change in international business environment has led to growing competitive pressure, changing critical success factors, threats and risks. As these changes affect the marketing programme, marketing process and overall marketing management process, the basic problem of international industrial company is related with timely and effective response to changes in international markets. For effective problem solving marketing manager requires a continuous flow of reliable and decision-oriented information from various sources inside and outside the company. The problem is often not lack of data, but the lack of proper information. In international marketing literature one would mostly find a general description of the marketing information system without necessary detailed explanation how this system should be integrated with marketing management process. It is the purpose of this paper to explore this rather neglected field more in detail and to present a comprehensive model of decision support system, based on the analysis of strategic marketing decisions and information needs of decision-makers at various levels of international industrial marketing management. Therefore, my emphasis in the paper is concerned with the logical information structure (conceptual databank) rather than with the physical structure (formal databank design). To manage information resources on a rational basis, the databank model should be flexible, enabling necessary adaptation of a system to changing nature of information needs of marketing decision-makers due to alternative modes of company’s international market entry (internationalisation strategies) and differences regarding the commitment of resources to foreign markets and information gathering process. A multilevel approach to databank development is discussed and the International Marketing Information Centre (I M I C) proposed as extension of/replacement for the traditional Marketing Research Department. The major advantage of this approach is a rational and flexible integration of data from various sources with effective marketing management process.