Porter (1986)

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Porter (1986) - Changing Patterns of International Competition

Companies can either concentrate their activities and serve the world from a small number of places, or disperse their activities and offset this dispersion with excellent co-ordination.

There are 3 basic roles that marketing plays in international strategy:

1. Some industries can concentrate their marketing activities on a worldwide basis, serving the world from one place. This is a difficult and usually an unwise thing to do, as much of marketing must take place where the buyer is.
2. Co-ordinating dispersed marketing activities. There are 3 ways to do this:
   1. Use similar tactics across countries, such as brand, product positioning.
   2. Transfer knowledge learned from one country to another
   3. Integrate efforts across countries
3. Use marketing in other areas, such as upstream activities, as learning from “having high-volume production of common line of product varieties”. The marketing department is able to inform the designers of incoming and universal trends, meaning that they can design better products to market to more people.

Product varieties