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Today, it is rare to find a U.S. firm that never ventures outside its domestic market. Even if it deals primarily with the U.S. market, which is huge in its own right, it may look overseas for raw materials or component parts or it may face foreign competition in its home market. Those who venture abroad may find the international marketplace far different than the domestic one they are accustomed to. Market sizes, buyer behavior, and marketing practices all vary. To be successful, international marketers must do their homework, capitalize on similarities, and carefully evaluate all market segments in which they expect to compete.

From the dawn of civilization until the lSOOs, world population grew to about 1 billion people. It almost doubled by 1900, and today over 6 billion people inhabit the planet. According to Census Bureau projections, world population will increase to nearly 8 billion in the next 25 years. Ninety-six percent of the increase in world population occurs in less-developed regions such as Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Population growth rates in affluent countries, however, have slowed to 0.4 percent annually—one fifth the annual growth of less-developed countries. What this all means is that, over the next quarter-century, firms will have to adapt their goods and services to meet the needs and wants of consumers in developing countries.
One-fifth of the world’s population—l.2 billion people—lives in China, for example, but less than one in 20 resides in the United States. Africa is growing fastest at 2.8 percent a year, followed by Latin America at 1.9 percent and Asia at 1.7 percent. Average birth rates are dropping around the world due to family planning efforts, but death rates are declining even more rapidly. However, in Africa the birth rates are still high (6 children per woman), and Indian women average 3.4 children. European birth rates have fallen considerably, and couples average only 1.5 children. This could present economic challenges as the age distribution shifts due to the low birth rate.’4
The world marketplace is increasingly an urban marketplace. Today, almost 50 percent of its people live in large cities. As a result, city populations are swelling: 39 cities currently have a population of 5 million or more. Mexico City, whose population of 18 million ranks it as the world’s largest city; is expected to grow to 31 million by 2010. Increased urbanization will expand the need for transportation, housing, machinery, and services.
The growing size and urbanization of the international marketplace does not necessarily mean all foreign markets offer the same potential. Another important influence on market potential is a nation’s economic development stage. A subsistence economy offers a different environment than that of a newly industrialized country or an industrial nation. In a subsistence economy, most people engage in agriculture and earn low per-capita incomes, supporting few opportunities for international trade. In a newly industrialized counny, such as Brazil or South Korea, growth in manufacturing creates demand for consumer products and industrial goods such as high-tech equipment, The industrial nations, including the United States, Japan, and western Europe, trade manufactured goods and services among themselves and export to less-developed countries. Although these wealthy countries account for just a small percentage of the world’s population, they produce over half of its output.
As a nation develops, an increasingly affluent, educated, and cosmopolitan middle class emerges. India’s middle class includes nearly 300 million people, a number larger than the entire population of the United States. India’s processed food producers and marketers are now facing global competition as a result of economic reforms and market liberalization. The greatest concerns for foreign companies seeking new markets in India is overcoming inadequate and restricted marketing channels. However, significant opportunities can be found through joint ventures and strategic alliances. International marketers see similar growth in middle-income households occurring in the booming East Asian economies like China, Thailand, Singapore, South Korea, and Hong Kong, as well as in Mexico, South America, and sub-Saharan Africa. These new middle-class consumers have both the desire for consumer goods, including luxury and leisure goods and services, and money to pay for them.

Besides generating additional revenue, firms are expanding their operations outside their home country to gain other benefits, including new insights into consumer behavior, alternative distribution strategies, and advance notice of new products. By setting up foreign offices and production facilities, marketers may learn new marketing techniques and gain invaluable experience.
Global marketers are typically well-positioned to compete effectively with foreign competitors. With the fall of Soviet Russia came the rise of a new economy. Although Russia has a well-deserved reputation for being a difficult market to enter, Western companies flocked to the 150 million, product-starved consumers, and many have found the effort worthwhile. A major key to achieving success in foreign markets is a firm’s ability to adapt its products to local preferences. For decades, Bestfoods, makers of Hellmann’s mayonnaise, has marketed different mayonnaise recipes around the world. The special recipe for Russia, for example, is a near-liquid version that is much blander than the U.S. version. Unlike Americans, who spread mayonnaise on bread, Russians pour it over vegetables) Hellman’s has been one of the few foreign companies that has been successful in its marketing efforts to Russia. Its greatest competitive threat comes from state-owned leader Moszhircom mayonnaise.
Another method used by international marketers before entering foreign markets is to conduct transcontinental product testing. Procter & Gamble is a veteran of global marketing but only recently began to develop truly global products. Swiffer, a lightweight mop with disposable cleaning cloths that use static electricity to pick up dust, hair, and other dirt, was test marketed in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and in Sens, France, before its global launch. It was found to be successful in both markets. The name Swiffer is meant to convey speed and ease of use and is used in promotions as both a noun and a verb, as in “Let’s Swiffer the floor.” As one P&G spokesperson explained, “The more that we truly explore consumers on a global basis, the more we find that they’re really more alike than they are dissimilar.” Global testing was also used for P&G’s Dryel home dry-cleaning products. Test sites for Dryel were in Ohio and Ireland.
Since firms must perform the marketing functions of buying, selling, transporting, storing, standardizing and grading, financing, risk taking, and obtaining market information in both domestic and global markets, some may question the wisdom of treating international marketing as a distinct subject. After all, international marketing is marketing; a firm performs the same functions and works toward the same objectives in domestic or international marketing. As the chapter will explain, however, both similarities and differences influence strategies for international and domestic marketing.

As marketing enters the 21st century, a significant change is taking place in the way companies interact with customers. The traditional view of marketing as a simple exchange process—a concept that might be termed transaction-based marketing—is being replaced by a different, longer-term approach.
Traditional marketing strategies focused on attracting customers. The goal was to identi15 prospects, convert them to customers, and complete sales transactions. But today’s marketers realize that, although it remains important, attracting new customers is only an intermediate step in the marketing process. Marketing efforts must focus on establishing and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships with existing customers. These efforts must expand to include suppliers and employees, as well.
This concept, called relationship marketing, refers to the development, growth, and maintenance of long-term, cost-effective exchange relationships with individual customers, suppliers, employees, and other partners for mutual benefit. It broadens the scope of external marketing relationships to include suppliers, customers, and referral sources. In relationship marketing, the term customer takes on a new meaning. Employees serve customers within an organization as well as outside it; individual employees and their departments are customers of and suppliers to one another. They must apply the same high standards of customer satisfaction to intradepartmental relationships as they do to external customer relationships. Relationship marketing recognizes the critical importance of internal marketing to the success of external marketing plans. Programs that improve customer service inside a company also raise productivity and staff morale, resulting in better customer relationships outside the firm.
Relationship marketing gives a company new opportunities to gain a competitive edge by moving customers up a loyalty hierarchy from new customers to regular purchasers, then to loyal supporters of the company and its goods and services, and finally to advocates who not only buy the company’s products but recommend them to others. By converting indifferent customers into loyal ones, companies generate repeat sales. The cost of maintaining existing customers is far below the cost of finding new ones, and these loyal customers are profitable ones.
Programs to encourage customer loyalty are not new. Visa teams up with Holiday Inn resorts and hotels during peak vacation months. Holiday Inn advertisements target families, offering a “kids eat free, stay free” program. In addition, travelers who use their Visa cards to stay at one of over 1,000 participating hotels receive a Kids’ Activity Book with valuable coupons. Visa has a similar program with Best Western; vacationers who use their Visa card to purchase a Summer Adventures Fun Plan also receive a Fujifilm QuickSnap camera with free film processing, a DC Comics activity book, and Internet software from AT&T WorldNet Service. Best Western lodgers can also enter a sweepstakes using their Visa card.
Effective relationship marketing relies heavily on information technologies such as computer databases that record customers’ tastes, price preferences, and lifestyles along with the increase of electronic communications. This technology helps companies become one-to-one marketers that gather customer-specific information and provide individually customized goods and services. The firms target their marketing programs to appropriate groups, rather than relying on mass-marketing campaigns. Companies who study their customers’ preferences and react accordingly gain distinct competitive advantages.
Firms in the service industry, from retailers to hotels to airlines, are among the leaders in relationship marketing. Their staff members have many opportunities to meet customers personally and build loyalty and repeat business. Rewards for frequent buyers of a firm’s goods or services, such as hotel programs that reward frequent visitors with free
room stays and other travel discounts, are another form of relationship
marketing.

You are very lucky Why? Because so many people and companies want your attention to such a great extent that they’re willing to give you valuable information for free that you once paid dearly for, or at least mark down the price to what was unimaginable just a few years ago. And guess what? You will continue to get even luckier. In an effort to keep up with the increasing competition for your attention, those companies will continuously need to offer their constituents higher-quality information. How lucky you will be is determined by your ability to exploit this happy circumstance. In these pages, I will share with you some of the most delectable offerings out there. In addition, I will share with you the tricks of the trade to get what you want.
If the beloved American monologist Will Rogers were alive today, he might say the following about the Internet: “You know they’re telling the truth when they say there are over 100 million Web pages on the Internet because when you do a search for something, you get 95 million of them back.” Here you’ll discover how to separate the wheat from the chaff and learn how to whittle down what seems like millions of search results to a meaningful few that deserve your attention and focus. Maybe you’re not looking for a piece of information that’s on the Net, but rather an answer to a question. I’ll show you some places where you can get those questions answered.
Information is like oil. You have to know how and where to drill for it. That knowledge gives you two competitive advantages: First, if your cost of gathering information is lower, you can run smarter and leaner than your competitor. Second, unearthing information your competitor doesn’t know about opens up doors of opportunity that he or she can’t even perceive. Imagine if your competition didn’t use computers today. He wouldn’t be a competitor very long, would he? The same is quickly becoming true for finding and using information on the Internet. If you can’t find information quickly and easily, you will not be a competitor in your field, whether that information is statistics, government regulations, market research, or customer feedback. If you get to those nuggets of knowledge first, you’re that much ahead of everyone else. After reading this chapter, you’ll be armed with information about:
• Search strategies Push
• Boolean searches
• Filtering agents
• Sweet spots for information
• Soliciting customer input
• Selected sites to see

In the pre-Industrial Revolution days, work was farmed out to people’s homes, where they had looms, spinning wheels, and cobbler benches that were used to turn out the products. It was the Industrial Age that centralized the workplace. Now, in the Information Age, we are shifting back again the other way; only this time, instead of looms, spinning wheels, and cobbler benches, we have computers, modems, faxes, and printers.
It doesn’t matter if you’re farming out programming, spreadsheet analysis, copyrighting, or graphics, it’s all information that is more easily transported than actually moving you, your vendors, or your employees. If a vendor is working out of a home or small office, he or she often incurs all the costs of hardware, software, Internet connection, phone, electricity, and so on. While this flat-out Darwinian marketplace can be brutal on small firms and independents, many prefer it because their income is diversified across a number of clients and subsequent  revenue streams. I remember I was once let go from an advertising agency because some “bean counter” in London said the New York office had to Cut back 40 people. One of the most stressful aspects of employment is not having control over your circumstances.
Dianna Husum, one of my editors for Web Digest For Marketers, lives in San Diego. We have worked together for years, and it was only recently that we actually met in person. It was a funny encounter, having worked so closely together with someone, only to meet for the first time. We are not the only ones experiencing this “work-together-and-meet-later” phenomenon. It’s happening everywhere. Keep an eye out for pontifical articles discussing how this phenomenon will alter social patterns in our society. The irony is that Nancy C. Hanger, my developmental editor, with whom I worked closely on this very book, lives and works in New Hampshire. No, we’ve never met. How did we connect? Through a mutual colleague, Daniel P. Dern. How do I know Daniel? Through the Internet.

Once your company has embraced the idea of farming work out on the Net, you will most likely find yourself asking the next logical question: “Is it necessary to have this person on staff at all?” In many cases, you will indeed need and want that person on staff, for reasons of consistency, security, workload, and so on. If it’s possible to stay open to the idea of simply outsourcing a function (which you may already be doing locally), then why not consider doing so over the Net? Again, the savings can be substantial. You may or may not pay a bit more for the luxury of having just-in-time help, but that is often easily offset by the downtime you have when there is no work for your staff who you usually would be paying. There you are, the clock is ticking, you have no work for them at the moment, and they’re having a good old time buying “hotel art” in some auction site on the Net. Not only are those employees’job security at risk, but the overall health and welfare of your unit or company is at risk as well.
Another word of caution: If you’re looking for someone to work with you on an ongoing project, it is advisable to first meet that person, or at least figure out if you both are temperamentally suited for each other. You can use the Kiersey Temperament Sorter at http://keirsey.com/cgi-bin/keirsey/newkts.cgi for this purpose, although be advised that it is not the be-all and end-all of “psychological” testing materials. People are indeed more complicated than a few simplified categories of reactions, but this can give you a general idea of how you might interact at a distance. Remember that email/Net interactions can be far different and more difficult than face-to-face ones. Think of how some Usenet newsgroup “flame wars” can start so easily over one emphasized word in a posting that in a letter or oral communication would have meant nothing at all. Interaction using the Net is a new medium, with its own pitfalls and advantages, and only time and experience will show you the differences.

In a small business especially, you will want to work with someone who has skills you don’t have. This way, the most number of skill sets are covered by the fewest number of people. However, people with different skill sets are often drawn to those pursuits based on their charactet The point here is to make sure you can work with someone who may well be your exact opposite in nature, attitudes, and values. I’ve been in a couple of working relationships that went down in flames solely because of core value differences that weren’t fleshed out at the beginning. In addition, make sure that roles, expectations, job descriptions, communications, and so forth are spelled out clearly ahead of time and are continually refreshed as necessary, even more so than in an in-office relationship. The same goes for any offsite employees, if you are a manager handling contractors, as noted in the previous section of this chapter.
Also keep in mind that you will want to check out your potential partner’s background via a résumé and references, and keep in mind that the price you end up paying may be closer to the usual contract costs in order to get the best. Using the Internet is not necessarily cheap. You indeed can get what you pay for, from both ends of the spectrum.
Internet teamwork is like dating: both sides tend to present their best sides at first. Similarly, the medium of email leaves much open for interpretation. Even though I get scoffed at by my Net-cognoscenti friends, I often use emoticons when writing email. This is to ensure the other side will know what I meant to say, since there isn’t a common environment and they can’t see my facial expressions or hear the tone of my voice.

I talked about this idea of managing brain power with Dane Atkinson, president of SenseNet, a major provider of network solutions located in New York City. He told me, “Much of what we at SenseNet do for our Fortune 500 clients is to build intranets that outsiders never even see, which supports the efficient deployment of brain power already on staff?’ He went on to say, “For example, we put into place a system that can access a calendar through a company’s intranet. Most of the employees of that company can access who’s doing what, when, and with what skill sets. A project manager at another end of the company may need those skill sets when a person is scheduled to complete his or her current project. Being able to manage the skills and time of employees efficiently makes for a more competitive body of knowledge.”