Revision and practice on the purpose, value and challenges of marketing internationally.
Key vocabulary: International Marketing, Globalisation, Marketing Mix, Culture
Businesses market their products internationally to find new opportunities for growth that may not exist in their domestic (home) market.
Operating in an unfamiliar market creates significant challenges that can lead to costly mistakes.
Key challenges:
Globalisation (think global, act global): a standardised product sold all over the world. E.g. Coca-Cola.
Glocalisation (think global, act local): maintains a global brand identity but adapts the user experience, taste, language, or product features to local customs. E.g. Starbucks.
| 4P's | Adaptations |
|---|---|
| Product | The product itself often needs to be adapted to meet local tastes, needs, or legal requirements ('Glocalisation'). |
| Price | A business cannot assume it can charge the same price in every country. Different incomes, tax systems, level of competition. |
| Place | The way a product is distributed from the factory to the consumer may need to be completely different in a new market. Different infrastructures, retail landscapes. |
| Promotion | How a business advertises and promotes its product must be sensitive to local culture, language, and regulations. Language barriers, cultural sensitivity, advertising regulations. |
Netflix has continued to invest heavily in "hyper-local" original content across Asia-Pacific and Latin America in particular, alongside extensive subtitle and dubbing language support and region-by-region content curation, as a core part of its international growth strategy into 2026. This is a useful contrast to the food-industry examples in this lesson: Netflix's glocalisation is about content, not physical products — it keeps the same core subscription platform and app experience worldwide, while adapting what actually appears in each country's content library. It shows glocalisation applies well beyond physical products — a service or digital platform can adapt its core offering (its content) to local culture while keeping its underlying business model standardised.
Source: verified via search, September 2026 — TradingView/Globe and Mail coverage of Netflix's global content strategy and its local-language original content investment.
Although IKEA is presented in this lesson's Application Task as the standardisation example, its restaurant menus are genuinely adapted country by country: crayfish in Japan, fish and chips in the UK, shawarma in Dubai, and — out of respect for Hindu beliefs — no pork-and-beef Swedish meatballs in India, replaced by chicken meatballs, biryani, samosas and vegetarian hotdogs. Its one truly consistent global menu item is the classic Swedish meatball itself (still served, in a suitable form, almost everywhere). This is a useful nuance for a top-band answer: very few global businesses are 100% standardised or 100% adapted — IKEA keeps its furniture range, store layout and brand largely standardised, but deliberately adapts food, where local culture and religious beliefs matter most to customers.
Source: verified via search, September 2026 — Gulf News and Hunker coverage of IKEA's country-by-country restaurant menu adaptations.
Tap an example below, then tap the element of the marketing mix it's adapting.
0 of 6 sorted
Short, snappy recall questions — tap to reveal the answer.
Selling a standardised product all over the world.
Adapting a global brand to local customs while keeping a global identity.
Any one of: cultural differences, legal/political differences, economic differences, logistical issues.
0 known · 0 still learning
Tap a card to flip it, then rate yourself.
Connecting to branding (previous lesson): Glocalisation is really brand identity management applied across borders — a business like Starbucks keeps its core brand identity (name, logo, café experience) globally consistent while adapting specific product and promotional elements locally. Strong answers can explain glocalisation as a specific application of brand identity concepts studied earlier, not as an entirely separate idea.
When asked to adapt the marketing mix for a new country, don't just list all 4Ps generically — the strongest answers identify which P is most affected for a specific product and market, and explain why (e.g. price is often the most sensitive P where income levels differ hugely between the home and target country).
Before using this: AI tools can get facts or mark scheme details wrong, and quality varies by tool. Always check anything factual against your notes or ask your teacher.
Give me the name of a real UK or global brand and a country it operates in outside the UK. Ask me to identify one way it has likely adapted each of the 4Ps (product, price, place, promotion) for that market, and to say whether I think its overall approach is closer to standardisation or glocalisation, with a reason.