International Advertising Strategies

International advertising strategies

International advertising strategies

Theodore Levitt's seminal article ‘The Globalisation of Markets' (Harvard Business Review 1983) caused many companies to examine their international advertising strategies and to adopt a global strategy. What problems do you see in such an approach?

Advertising is a universal business activity today. As media has spread across the world and marketers have expanded it reaching different unexplored counties, advertising is gaining impetus in the whole globe and it is easy to identify when you move from a place to another or simply when you travel that you realize that advertising is the most visible manifestation of the globalization of business in general and of brands in particular.

Advertising allows consumers to "compare goods, which often results in lower prices and improved product quality; advertising stimulates the economy by encouraging consumption; and it has the potential to improve living standards" (Mueller, 1996, p. 256).

When you talk about International Advertising it is means that you are talking about cross-border advertising and it is possible to have a specific connotations that you can adopted as a global strategy. According to Jones, J. (2000) there is two countries who believe that their advertising is the best in the world: United Kingdom and United States, and he stressed that the language (English) has becoming the primary worldwide language, at least for business; that belief make it change Levitt's concept of global marketing into global advertising.

The number of global brands is very short and it is always easy to remember the names. It is not necessary for a global brand to use global advertisement executions, as Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Marlboro cigarettes, Kodak, Benetton, Gucci, Sony, etc. use to modify and accommodate it according to local norms, preferences and tastes around the world.

The first goal of this paper is to establish that multinational and the global corporation are not the same thing. The multinational corporation operates in a number of countries, and adjusts and varies its products and procedures in each at high costs, in other hand the global corporation operates with determined constancy at low cost as if the entire world were a single entity; it sells the same things in the same way everywhere. (Theodore Levitt, 1984). I focused on the process to adopt international advertising to a global environment looking at international business theories and determining the set of issues that can be against to this implementation.

Levitt's theory has become a lightening rod in the debate about globalization, there are some key arguments and reasons why companies should adopt a global strategy, based on geocentric approach theory where the entire world is viewed as a single market from the advertising