Essay About International Marketing Environment Analysis And Lack Of Research

International Marketing Environment Analysis
The Marketing Review 2005, 5, 159-173 www.themarketingreview.com
ISSN 1472-1384/2005/2/00159 + 14 £8.00/0 ©Westburn Publishers Ltd.
Geri Clarke1
International Business School
International Marketing Environment Analysis
Academic international marketing researchers have drawn attention to the
lack of research into, amongst other things, the international marketing
environment. This can seriously limit the practicality of international
marketing plans. The usual domestic environmental audit is not sufficient
for the more complex international environment. This paper proposes a
more complex framework of twelve variables and three elements and
presents this new IMEA (international marketing environment analysis)
framework as a blueprint for international marketing auditing and
scanning.
Of the twelve variables, seven are new: that is they are presented as
important enough to be considered in their own right rather than as
subsections of the existing domestic audit. Three of these variables are
investigated further to elaborate on elements that need to be reviewed to
provide a rigorous and comprehensive IMEA for successful international
marketing in a turbulent environment.
Keywords: international marketing management, environmental
analysis, auditing and scanning, teaching, practitioners
Introduction
Leaders in the field of international marketing have indicated over the
past five years that the discipline had failed to be taken seriously by the
practitioner community (Czinkota and Rokainen 2003); that its core topics
are being sidelined by more pervasive developments in the marketing
mainstream (Kotabe 2001, Katsikeas 2003) and that it had lost its
working dynamic (Walters 2001). As a result of such self-criticism a
number of agendas were put forward (Czinkota and Rokainen 2001,
Kotabe 2001, Walters 2001) recommending that International Marketers