Pros & Cons of Global Marketing Strategy

Developing a global marketing strategy requires more than taking your regional or national plan and expanding it worldwide. If you currently have a global demand or can create one for your product or service, it may be worthwhile to consider a global marketing strategy. Plan carefully to ensure the advantages and benefits outweigh the disadvantages and risks.

Expanding to a global marketing strategy means you’ll also expand your customer base for an increase in sales. Global distributorships combined with Internet and electronic communication make managing a global sales force feasible. Incorporating localization into your marketing strategy, which is the practice of customizing your efforts to individual markets within a country or international region, recognizes that each international locale has different needs and could boost sales.

As your market expands, so will your visibility. Going into one country successfully, for example, will give you greater name recognition as you expand into another. This not only affects sales through name recognition, but also helps you recruit local employees, sign on new distributors and work with media in each country as part of your overall marketing efforts.

Expansion in any form takes financial resources, and exercising a global strategy is expensive. You need additional personnel and the technology to manage and monitor them. One localization strategy is to practice geocentrism, which means that you market your company or product as much as you can without making language, cultural or other adaptive changes, but be ready to incorporate necessary changes when necessary. This will incur costs for such things as logo redesign, translation services, and advertising or public relations costs.

Crisis management is important to any company but is more challenging on a global basis. Political or societal changes can cause business upheavals overnight, so you need to constantly monitor activity or pay someone to do so on your behalf. Natural disasters can disrupt your supply chain as well as cause issues with your in-country employees. Managing this from across the globe is difficult to do in a timely manner and may cost money as well as damage your reputation.