The world is a small place thanks to the Internet, but there are still plenty of differences between people by nations. Those differences often translate into global and domestic marketing problems.
As a result, marketing techniques require the use of national and cultural characteristics.
Values, concerns and attitudes need to be considered for target markets using the concept of market segmentation.
Global and Domestic Marketing: Consider Differences In People By Nations
Different cultures within the USA, and across the world, are going to have different buying habits. This presents a problem when you are trying to sell a product across nations.
Even with USA residents, culture differs by national origin. Yet, most USA residents have been somewhat assimilated into the USA culture. So differences intensify across borders.
Global and Domestic Marketing: Demographics Change Across Borders
Once you have left the United States, market segmentation criteria vary from nation to nation. Each country is defined by a different history and culture. Marketing using a hockey player works in Canada, but it won’t work in Morocco.
The World War II generation in the USA was influenced by the second world war just like most people in the Western world. However, the influence of Pearl Harbor on the USA WWII generation was greater than for those in the rest of the world.
So you can’t take characteristics that best define a USA generation and transfer those characteristics world wide.
Global and Domestic Marketing: Psychographic Segments Differ
Psychographic characteristics also differ by nations. For one reason, culture, morals, values and attitudes are learned within a society. Different nations develop different social pressures and expectations. They teach different values and attitudes within families and schools.
Every nation’s culture differs so what is valued, expected, desired, and feared vary by nation.
For example, it was once common for USA Caucasian families to teach their children that African or Black Americans were inferior and should be treated as such. Some organizations like the Klu Klux Klan even regularly practiced murdering and torturing Blacks and got away with it. And this was after World War I when the Nazis were considered abhorrent for their racial hatred.
This illustrates that many nationally specific events, beliefs and culture form the personalities of people. So personality characteristics must differ nation to nation.
Global and Domestic Marketing: People’s Buying Preferences Vary
Because each nation’s economy is based and distributed differently, what people can afford and what they value enough to spend their money on changes across nations.
But spending preferences go beyond people’s ability to buy. It is closely tied to culture, social pressure, ideas of success and many other nationally specific characteristics.
Take grocery shopping as an example. In many prosperous European nations, people still buy fresh groceries from local markets and purchase every day for that day’s meals.
But in the USA, we buy from large chains that freeze, can, dehydrate and process in other ways so that food lasts for a long time. Then we buy at least enough for a week at a time, and some people buy for a month at a time. We think shopping everyday would be a terrible inconvenience and that we are just too busy with our careers and family to spend that much time buying groceries.
Surely, people in lots of other nations consider our food buying habits foolish.
If we are so different in the way we purchase survival products like food, how much more different are we when it comes to buying other products.
Global and Domestic Marketing: Conclusion
Marketing campaigns can not be successfully transferred from one nation to another.
International marketing demands that a unique marketing program be created for each nation and that marketers know characteristics of the people in each nation.
Unfortunately, there is little systematic research being accumulated and shared with business owners about people in other nations. As the world gets smaller and the Internet gets larger, that has to change. We must do a better job of global and domestic marketing.