Global and Local Marketing

You might think you’ve created an excellent strategy for your brand in one local market, only to realize that the rest of the world has access to that same local communication. This exposure destroys any possibility of separating your local branding strategy from your global branding strategy. This unavoidable exposure of your local brand-building strategy in the international arena is part of the growing difficulties that attend global brand building.In the 1980s, the advertising industry underwent a process of transnationalization, paralleling that of other producer services such as accounting and law firms. As agencies have expanded geographically through foreign direct investment and acquisition, they have reorganized branches in order to offer clients centralized and coordinated services. But what is difference between local and global marketing? In this paper I try to analyze concept of local and global marketing.

Also I show how globalization in marketing has increased over the past and moved away traditional local marketing theories. However, first of all let me bring your attention to the concepts of local and global marketing. Local marketing theories are determined to analyze and organize marketing strategies concerning local customer segments, as on the other hand, global marketing describes needs of multicultural and multinational customers. Globalization is at once a theoretical premise in advertising, a structural dynamic in the industry, and an emerging market phenomenon. Located in a pivotal position between production and consumption, the advertising industry plays a key role in constituting the geographic boundaries of markets and in the internationalization of consumer culture. Similar to many other industries today, the cultural and economic roles of advertising cannot be separated.

Marketing is both industry and ideology (Sassen 1991). While complex interconnections among places and between the global and the local have always existed, we need to examine how spatial meanings and identities are worked and reworked by advertisers. The current period does not point to pan-cultural homogenization so much as to growing complexity (Pred and Watts 1992). The advertising industry and its discourses constitute one important locus in which these meanings are mediated. During the last few decades, those services necessary for organizing a global production system have expanded (Sassen 1991). Although the globalization of large corporations and banks has been widely discussed, relatively little attention has been devoted to the range of supportive services needed to maintain global production (Daniels 1993).

As mass markets fragment and the pace of planned obsolescence accelerates, producers face a heightened need to establish perceived differences among goods, leading to an increased emphasis on design, packaging, and advertising. The recent reorganization of capitalism thus forces us to consider cultural as well as economic change. New geographies of service provision and consumption are emerging alongside the shifting geographies of production. At the same time that advertising have grown in importance, market saturation in advanced industrialized economies has motivated both agencies and clients to move offshore in search of new markets. While some producer services tend to centralize production in key locations and to export their products, advertising have adopted different strategies. Because advertising relies on detailed local knowledge and face-to-face contact with clients, agencies are more likely to export their services through direct foreign investment, setting up branch offices and affiliates abroad.

Globalization refers to the interrelatedness of different places around the globe. It also plays on the recognition of fragmentation; lying behind the concept is a sense that contemporary nations have become so diverse internally in terms of culture that it is hard to argue that they have common characteristics. Thus, globalization refers not just to societies, nations, and regions coming together in various ways, but also to a heightened globalization within nations (Robertson 1992). …