The Diversity Of Global Marketing

In a world where large corporations compete internationally, never has so much time and money been spent on advertising to boost both brand and product awareness. In simpler times, businesses could establish themselves and be concerned solely with competing organisations from the same towns and cities. Not so today, when companies are marketing to people not only nationally, but also internationally. Gone are the times when local business was sufficient; for large organisations, the market is global.

And with this, the levels of competition are set extremely high which reflects the tactics, amount of time, and monetary investment huge corporations will spend on their marketing activities. Whilst in distant times a simple newspaper advertisement would be sufficient for boosting the number of clients, organisations now embark on far more elaborate ways to bring their names and products to the attention of everyday consumers.

Internet campaigns, social network marketing, publicity stunts, product placement, television and radio advertisements, colour advertisements in magazines, sponsorship of events... all are well used approaches employed by keen marketing agencies. With so much effort spent on publicity, it is little wonder that the diaries of marketers are kept so full. I’m sure that many people working in the advertising industries will tell you their work is never over; even when one campaign is up and running, questions from above will soon materialise asking “what next?”, “how about trying this?”, talking about who to target in upcoming campaigns, which product to push, asking what the plan is to further your already elaborate marketing strategies.

With so much pressure placed upon marketing executives, it is of little wonder that approaches to advertising and marketing become both diverse and complicated. If marketers were always to adopt the same tried and tested approaches, the consumers would become used to the constant barrage of messages and learn to ignore them. So instead, different and varying approaches are adopted. Some may be simple, some may be elaborate. It comes as no surprise that marketing news is therefore always eventful.

Partnerships in marketing are becoming increasingly common. Film makers are often happy to feature a product in their movie if the supplier of the product pays them to do so; likewise food manufacturers of (for example) chocolate will work with manufacturers of ice creams and cakes to create a new further something that is already a well known brand. But these are relatively straight forward forms of marketing and more elaborate and clever approaches are thought up all the time. In the United States, Burger King once put a full page add to inform people of their new “left handed burger”, where the contents were rotated by 180 degrees to accommodate the 33 million left handed citizens. Thousands of people failed to realise the joke and attempted to order the imaginary new product.

Sometimes, marketers get things wrong. After months of planning and brainstorming sessions, the development of amazing ideas, global campaigns can stumble at the most obvious point – the language barrier. For example, Parker once decided to advertise their famous range of pens in Mexico, using the slogan “it won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you.” Due to problems with the translation of the word “embarrass” the campaign was launched with the message “it won’t leak in your pocket and impregnate you.”

Examples such as this may be comical, but they go to show the wide diversity of approaches marketers will attempt to employ in an effort to promote products and brands. The marketing world always has something new happening, and marketing news websites are a great way of finding the latest gossip and happenings of national and international organisations alike.