Global Marketing

Global Marketing is defined by our textbook as "marketing that targets markets throughout the world."  Global marketing benefits companies by promoting growth opportunities, promoting innovation, fostering the marketing of better, less expensive products, raising productivity and living standards, promoting competition, and offering access to foreign capital and global export markets.

Because global marketing is such a positive thing and offers so many new opportunities, many companies would like to get involved in the global market.   In class we discussed ten different ways to enter the global market, they are as follows:

• importing
• exporting
• licensing 
• franchising
• contract manufacturing
• outsourcing
• joint ventures 
• strategic alliances 
• direct ownership
• and multinational enterprise

One company that has successfully captured the global market is McDonald's.  They have done this through franchising.  Franchising is a form of licensing in which the Franchiser grants a franchisee the right to market its product with the franchiser's standards in exchange for money.  In other words, McDonald's allows a franchisee to pay them to open up a new McDonald's restaurant somewhere in the world, and in that restaurant the franchisee must have the same menu, restaurant design, uniforms, etc. that McDonald's requires they have.

More than 80% of McDonald's restaurants worldwide are operated by franchisees.  They have been recognized numerous amounts of times for their franchises.  Some examples provided by their website are:

• Entrepreneur Magazine – Every year, Entrepreneur Magazine lists its Franchise 500. Over the last several years McDonald’s has been recognized as one of the Top 10 Franchises.
• Franchise Times Magazine – McDonald’s has been ranked #1 on its list of top 200 franchises.
• USA Today – McDonald’s has been selected by the National Minority Franchise Initiative (NMFI) as one of the 50 Top Franchises for Minorities.
• Black Enterprise Magazine – McDonald’s was listed as one of the 40 best Franchises for African Americans.

More information about McDonald's franchising is available at http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/franchising.html.

What are some other companies that have used franchising to enter the global marketplace? Can you find any companies that have successfully gained entry into the global marketplace through one of the other nine methods?