International Marketing Environment Analysis

The Marketing Review 2005, 5, 159-173 www.themarketingreview.com

ISSN 1472-1384/2005/2/00159 + 14 £8.00/0 ©Westburn Publishers Ltd.

Geri Clarke1

International Business School

International Marketing Environment Analysis

Academic international marketing researchers have drawn attention to the

lack of research into, amongst other things, the international marketing

environment. This can seriously limit the practicality of international

marketing plans. The usual domestic environmental audit is not sufficient

for the more complex international environment. This paper proposes a

more complex framework of twelve variables and three elements and

presents this new IMEA (international marketing environment analysis)

framework as a blueprint for international marketing auditing and

scanning.

Of the twelve variables, seven are new: that is they are presented as

important enough to be considered in their own right rather than as

subsections of the existing domestic audit. Three of these variables are

investigated further to elaborate on elements that need to be reviewed to

provide a rigorous and comprehensive IMEA for successful international

marketing in a turbulent environment.

Keywords: international marketing management, environmental

analysis, auditing and scanning, teaching, practitioners

Introduction

Leaders in the field of international marketing have indicated over the

past five years that the discipline had failed to be taken seriously by the

practitioner community (Czinkota and Rokainen 2003); that its core topics

are being sidelined by more pervasive developments in the marketing

mainstream (Kotabe 2001, Katsikeas 2003) and that it had lost its

working dynamic (Walters 2001). As a result of such self-criticism a

number of agendas were put forward (Czinkota and Rokainen 2001,

Kotabe 2001, Walters 2001) recommending that International Marketers

pay