Business planning

Contrasting viewpoints have emerged regarding the selection of marketing strategies in global markets. One group of scholars recommends standardized global marketing strategies based on the premise that technological advances in telecommunication, transportation, and media are leading to similarities in customer preferences across the world. Other researchers recommend multi-domestic strategies on the premise that consumer heterogeneity continues to increase even within countries. Firms marketing products in global markets appear to adopt global marketing strategies, multi-domestic strategies, and various intermediate strategies that encompass different degrees of standardization. This research develops a theoretical framework to examine the factors that influence marketing strategies in global markets. Transaction cost analysis constructs are used to determine whether to standardize or customize marketing strategy. The basis for adopting different levels of standardization on marketing program and process variables is empirically investigated. A multinomial logit model is used to estimate the likelihood of adopting different degrees of standardization with data from American multinational corporations on 161 products marketed in different global markets. The results indicate that higher levels of asset specificity associated with patented technical knowledge favor physical attribute standardization in global markets. Volatile political environments, high degrees of ownership in affiliates, and global competitors' standardized marketing strategies encourage firms to tailor physical attributes. Brand names are standardized if the economic uncertainty is lower in foreign markets. Cultural dissimilarities between home and host countries hinder marketing control systems standardization. Operating experience in foreign countries and the need for technical service and customer interactions support standardization of marketing control systems. The need for specialized local market knowledge encourages the adoption of country-specific marketing research methods. Standardized pricing strategies are preferred over flexible country-specific strategies in volatile political environments.

This thesis presents a model designed to optimize the allocation of corporate resources required for the success of a product in the marketplace. The product development resources used in the model are: market research, applied research, product design, cost reduction and advertising. The key goals of this thesis are to provide industry with a usable tool: (1) Implement strategic plans through effective budgeting; (2) Optimize both short and long term profits; (3) Evaluate the impact of resource inter-dependencies; (4) Enable accountability that leads to goal achievement and checks unnecessary growth; (5) Remove much of the negative political and emotional variability; (6) Easily adapt to internal and external changes; (7) Output a specific allocation for each resource as a percentage of sales; (8) Output an estimate of future profitability. Genetic Algorithms are particularly well suited for this application because an exact optima is not required and the search space can be extremely large, complex, and non-linear.