Question

The global corporate strategy is a tradeoff between the need for local adaptation and the pressure to reduce costs. This leads to the choice of global, multidomestic, transnational, or home replication strategy. Review these corporate strategies in the text. What is the importance of the alignment of the marketing strategy with the corporate strategy? Is it possible to have one global marketing strategy such as a standardized marketing mix, or must the marketing strategy be adapted for each individual market? How might organizations determine the best marketing mix and ensure that the marketing mix supports the overall global corporate strategy?

Answer 1

1.

A strategic marketing plan is only as effective as a strategic business plan. As a marketer, you can write your marketing plan without having a strategic business plan to reference, but it will not be as effective. Leadership in your company should have a strategic plan to maintain or grow their business — along with providing you the foundation upon which to build your marketing plan.

A strategic plan gives everyone in the company direction on where it’s headed in the future (six, twelve, eighteen, twenty-four, thirty-six, and forty-eight months). Both short- and long-term goals must be included. The strategic plan committee should consist of five to twelve people, but everyone in the company must have a general knowledge of the plan. Each employee should understand how they fit into the strategic plan of the company and how they are participating in achieving the goals. This is instrumental to the success of the plan.

Once this strategic business plan has been assembled, communicated, and implemented, a strategic marketing plan must be created. By knowing the overall direction of the company, you will better be able to write and implement an effective marketing strategy. This ensures you, as the marketer or business developer, are spending your time in the right places according to the company’s strategy.

2. A global marketing strategy (GMS) is a strategy that encompasses countries from several different regions in the world and aims at coordinating a company’s marketing efforts in markets in these countries.

The “Four P’s” of marketing—product, price, placement, and promotion—are all affected as a company moves through the different phases to become and maintain dominance as a global company. Promotion becomes particularly important for positioning the company in such a way that a single product can be tweaked instead of revamped for different markets. Coca-Cola is one strong example of global marketing. The drink brand uses two formulas (one with sugar and one with corn syrup) for all markets. The product packaging in every country incorporates Coca-Cola’s contour bottle design and signature ribbon in some shape or form. However, the bottle can also include the country’s native language and appear in identical sizes as other beverage bottles or cans in that country’s market.

3. Organizations must find the right combination of factors that allow them to gain an advantage over their competitors. This combination—the marketing mix—is the combination of factors that a company controls to provide value to its target customers.

The challenge of getting the right marketing mix is magnified by the existence of competitors, who exert market pressures using strategies defined by their marketing mix alternatives. Remember, the purpose of the marketing mix is to find the right combination of product, price, promotion, and distribution (place) so that a company can gain and maintain advantage over competitors.

An effective marketing mix centers on a target customer. Each element of the mix is evaluated and adjusted to provide unique value to the target customer. In our shampoo example, if the target market is affluent women who pay for expensive salon services, then reducing the price of a premium product might actually hurt sales, particularly if it leads stylists in salons to question the quality of the ingredients. Similarly, making the packaging more appealing for a discount product could have a negative impact if it increases the price even slightly or if it causes shoppers to visually confuse it with a more expensive product.