International marketing – the issues 623
electronic calculators have been successfully
taken up everywhere. No disquiet has been
voiced over the demise of the abacus or slide
rule.
2 Mores. This is a Latin word for ‘morals’ or
‘customs’ and is often taken to mean the
established religion of a particular society and
the norms which it observes. Attempts to
challenge the established religion within a
country will not meet with success. With
regard to international advertising, scantily clad
women must not appear in advertising
destined for Muslim countries or Muslim
regions. Sometimes it is not the
fundamentalists or adherents who may raise
the problem, but those who do not practise
the religion in question but nevertheless feel a
certain unease over issues such as shops being
open on a Sunday or extensions to the
licensed drinking hours for bars and hotels.
3 Laws. There is very little international law, and
so with the exception of cases such as the Law
of the Sea and areas where international
treaties are seen to prevail, usually it is then
only domestic law which may have extra
territorial reach. This is primarily the case with
US law, which affects the operations not only
of US multinationals, but other Western
companies represented in the USA as well. The
lack of international law means there is a gap
to be filled in the case of international trading
disputes. In effect, the various industrial
arbitration councils whose establishment is not
formally recognized but whose judgements
have always been accepted in subsequent
actions in civil courts of law often undertake
this. Where existing law prohibits the sale of a
product, the only strategy may be to try to
have that law rescinded. This means lobbying
for a change in legislation or even new
legislation to enable this new and proposed
product or service to be offered to the buying
public. This could range from a variation being
required in planning permission to allow
out-of-hours shopping centres, Sunday opening
of shops or settling the ethical questions raised
by medical science, such as in vitrofertilization
of women, human embryo experimentation
and storage. As laws reflect a society’s attitude
towards a certain issue at a given moment in
time, and society changes, there is always
scope and argument for legal revision. In the
USA and Japan, the EU is seen as being an
effective legislative agency in its own right,
lobbying is becoming more intense, while in a
corresponding, separate movement, markets
slowly become more similar. New services,
such as satellite television, are not national but
international in character and require special
legal attention for their effective regulation.Segmentation
Segmentation is a process whereby instead of
focusing on the market at large we focus
instead on identifying likely buyers for goods
and services, and targeting them with informa-
tion. Success arises from having identified a
customer’s needs exactly. Buyers differ in terms
of their needs, perceptions and buying behav-
iour, so the intention is to try and get as close as
possible to the needs of a segment, provided
that segment meets the test of economic feasi-
bility. Segmentation makes economic sense in
terms of resource allocation, because it means
that all advertising and promotion has to be
narrowly defined for a product that has been
built with a well-defined customer base in
mind. Aside from the youth market, who are
the only demographically defined segment
internationally, there are many different forms
of segment to be found in terms of psycho-
graphic segmentation, e.g. the BMW-3 series or
shampoos for certain specific types of hair or
scalp condition. For different levels of value
added and across all product ranges, segmenta-
tion proves to be a very useful tool.
Before proceeding further with considera-
tions of product distribution, we have to
establish that the product is legal in the country
in which it is to be sold and that the resources
exist to target the chosen segment effectively.
Some companies seek to promote their highly
standardized product to essentially the same