Strategic Global Marketing: Lessons from the Japanese

As international market opportunities increased, Japan's global marketing strength became evident while American global market shares fell. Having secured its domestic markets, Japan expanded into developing and developed countries. It also pursued a strategy of producing products to sell in selected segments. Concurrent with this expansion was the development of a global marketing network which include, the important stage of establishing production facilities around the world. The authors document these two strategies and provide a case example of how Japan's consumer electronics industry became dominant via global marketing. The lessons for US companies are obvious. The purpose of this article is to draw some lessons on successful global marketing by examining Japan's patterns of global marketing. Two major strategic elements are examined--the strategic global market expansion path and the development of global marketing networks.