M26197 International Marketing Referral Guide The task is for you to choose a product and write a report recommending how it should enter and be launched in a country where it is not already available in a way that is appropriate and relevant to the culture, behaviour and habits of the potential customers in that country. The country cannot be your home country nor the country of origin of the product. In writing the report you are showing you can understand what marketing is about and can find, choose and use marketing ideas and data to make well thought out recommendations. The purpose of the assignment is to:

• Allow you to demonstrate your knowledge of marketing
• To show you can apply that knowledge in an international context
• To show you understand how a brand can enter an overseas market
• To show you understand why a brand entering a foreign market might need to change its marketing and advertising to suit the new country.
• To show you understand how a brand entering a foreign market might need to change its marketing and advertising to suit the new country.
• To test your ability to find and use information effectively
• Demonstrate your ability to apply your discoveries in an unfamiliar country

Therefore the brief requires you to:

• Choose a product or service you like.
  • The work is much easier if you select something that is a local brand from your home area.
  • It should be the type of thing that is bought frequently in the country you will choose to study because there is more information available for you to work with. For example, it is easier to choose a soap rather than a Ferrari.
  • The type of product should be bought in the country you are studying but not the actual brand you choose. Two examples:
    • If you want to look at cars and choose the United Kingdom then the Tata Nano (a small car) or the Mahindra Thar (an SUV/off road car) are good choices because lots of small cars or SUVs are sold in the UK, but not those models.
    • If you want to look at cosmetics then face cream is a commonly bought product but Blue Nectar or Ayurveda Pure are probably not sold in many countries.
    • If you want to look at fashion then LOVI sarongs is an example of a local brand from Sri Lanka and clothes are bought in most places!
• Avoid choosing a large or well-known company like Apple or McDonalds because their marketing is so good it becomes hard to suggest improvements.
• You do not need to spend much time looking at the company you choose. They are just the example you are working with. Write no more than a paragraph or two about them. Just enough so the marker understands what they sell and who their target customer is in the country they come from. In the example of the face cream, you might show this through looking up the price in a shop, showing whether in local terms this is expensive or cheap compared to average earnings (sources can include the average earnings from https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/ or purchasing power https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-ppp.htm or https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/comparison.jsp), and showing where it is sold (for example, in local stores, online, only in specialist shops, only in company owned shops etc). If they advertise you might want to include some pictures of their advertising and use this to talk briefly about their key selling points (in books this is called brand proposition or differentiation).
• Now choose a country to study. I recommend the UK because there is a lot of information in our on-line library for you to work with.
  • Although I suggest the UK the choice of country is up to you as long as the brand you have chosen is not already sold in that country.
• Now you show your marketing knowledge by finding information about the type of product or service you have chosen in the country you have chosen. Use our Library online information https://library.port.ac.uk/subject/page487.html#t487 Taking the example of the face cream in the UK you might find the following:
  • Mintel Report on Womens Facial Skincare, June 2022 https://clients.mintel.com/ This will show you the leading brands
  • Statista is a statistics database and this is where you will find trends and information about who buys what and changes over time. https://www.statista.com/
  • You know whether your product is, for example, high cost (luxury) or low cost (value) and the type of people who buy it in their native market. Say it is mainly middle aged people age 45-64, try looking at what face cream they buy in the UK using Mintel or Statista and then look on retailers sites, like Boots https://www.boots.com/ or Tesco https://www.tesco.com/ to see what they charge. That gives you competitors and price comparison.
• When using tools like PESTEL remember that you only include what is relevant to the product you have chosen. For example:
  • For the car you might point to emissions regulations and proposed changes to them under Technological or import taxes on cars made overseas under Political
  • For the face cream you might point to rules on ingredients and testing under Legal or rules on imagery used in adverts under Social.
• Think about how the product you have chosen might fit into the market of the country you have selected. Continuing to think about the face cream and UK, you might have found out that the cream is especially good for people with an Asian complexion or skin type. So a start might be to identify where people with this ethnic background live in the UK (try https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/uk-population-by-ethnicity or https://statistics.ukdataservice.ac.uk/ ) This could lead to suggestions about a niche market entry (see our core text: Hollensen Global Marketing chapter 9)
• Remember you are recommending what you believe is right for the product based on what you have found. You do not need to cover everything they might possibly do.

FINALLY: Based on what you have found think about:

• How the product should enter the market in the chosen country (Just ONE entry strategy is needed)
  • This is where you think about the company. If, for example, they are quite small like the clothing company I mentioned before then you do not recommend opening a chain of shops to rival Primark or a multi-million pound advertising campaign on television!
• Where/how it should be sold
• What changes should be made to the product, packaging or advertising and promotion to take account of the rules or cultural differences in the new country (You need to make three clear recommendations that come out of the analysis you have done).

Remember: This is a business style report. You can include any graphs, tables, pictures you think are relevant within your report. They do not count towards the word limit. Do ensure you cite the sources for everything you use (references are also excluded from the word count). Avoid using Appendices as these are not marked. The word limit is tight so be prepared to draft your work then edit it to only include relevant material. Now write the report and submit it. ?? Deadline: Friday 22 July 2022 by 23:55 UK time (early is OK, but not late).

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m26197-intern....docx