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Marketing managers with a strategic focus often see foreign markets as potential opportunities to increase sales and profits. Government leaders strongly urge domestic firms to 'go international' in order to create jobs and economic growth. However, research has shown that a major deterrent to entering foreign markets, from a firm's perspective, is a lack of foreign market knowledge. International marketing texts advise marketing managers to assess market potential based on a market's (nation's) income and population without practical 'how to' guidance. Too often when firms do decide to go international, the choice of foreign markets is made with little, if any, comparative market analysis based on research. This study explicates and develops practical tools for basic analysis of foreign markets. Over the last few years large volumes of data about world markets have become available on the Internet. This paper discusses public sources and practical methods for turning data into information using Excel spreadsheets and graphs. Its goal is to provide practical approaches and insights that are useful to marketing managers for comparing and understanding foreign customer populations and distributions of income.
Introduction
Marketing managers with a strategic focus often see foreign markets as potential opportunities to increase sales and profits. For firms in every nation, no matter how large, the market potential is greater in foreign markets than it is at home. Managers of businesses from smaller national markets inevitably recognise the necessity of doing business in foreign markets to achieve the economies of scale and scope to survive, let alone prosper. Even if internationalisation is not the main incentive for a firm's performance, failure to go international may eventually threaten its domestic dominance so that not going international incurs severe competitive risks (Tallman and Yip, 2001).
Government leaders exhort domestic firms to 'go international' in order to create jobs and economic growth. For instance, Enterprise Ireland's 2005-7 Strategic Plan for Irish industry seeks to foster the development and internationalisation of Irish-owned business to increase national and regional prosperity. The core focus of the so-called O'Driscoll report, 'Ahead of the curve: Ireland's place in a global economy', is on the internationalisation and export growth of indigenous firms to drive future economic development (Enterprise Ireland, 2005). Business leaders echo the government's call for...