Country Manager

To determine our market entry strategy, our team completed a simple Market Attractiveness Spreadsheet that evaluated Climate, Competition, Customers and Company (appendix 1). For Climate, we considered factors such as economic stability and maturity, urbanization and cost of salespersons. The purpose was to help identify the location with easy access to a concentrated population of people that is generally well off but will not break the bank to hire a Salesforce. In addition to Climate, we also took notice of the current Competition in each of the six countries. Locations saturated with many competitors, especially multinationals, can be less attractive than countries controlled by domestics. Local and Regional companies are less likely to have the resources to compete at a large scale on production, distribution and advertising. However, a large contingent of multinationals could prove beneficial in terms of paving the way for other international brands to enter the market. Furthermore, if no multinationals are in a market, there may be a good reason why they chose not to enter. Beyond Competition, we considered our current capabilities as a Company to serve each of the markets. Proximity to each of the countries is important as it drives the immediate shipping costs until we are able to build a production facility in Latin America. In addition, countries with trade agreements will offer the benefit of reducing, or even eliminating, tariffs.

By far the most important factor in determining our long-term strategy for market entry is the Customer, driven by three key factors: size, affluence and preference in shopping channels. In a market like toothpaste, where we have the ability to offer an Economy product that can serve the masses, size is a critical driver of market attractiveness. Beyond size, we also considered the affluence of market. No matter how large a population is, if a significant portion is living well below the poverty line or has an unusually low per capita GDP, our target segments may not be sufficient to drive profitability. The distribution is relevant as it relates directly to how people prefer to purchase products and the size of our margins due to the distribution channels.

The weighting of the four factors that we considered illustrate one key point; customer need drives our marketing strategy. If there is a big enough market for our product in any one of the countries, we can implement various strategies to mitigate the risks of current competition and social or economic factors. Also, our advantages as a company today, built by current trade agreements and our geographic location, can be improved upon easily by building a production facility in another location that would allow us similar benefits within another region.

Based on the factors above, we developed an initial strategy for AllStar brand. We decided to enter Mexico in the first period while concurrently building a plant in Chile with a