CHAPTER 8
Applying the Lessons Learned IT’S NOT WHAT YOU KNOW, IT’S WHAT YOU DO
“is the performance of business activities in more than one nation. But more than that, it is not simply doing business in more than one nation, but doing business in more than one culture,” according to international business educator and writer Paul Herbig. He states that a company, “could perform all of its business in the same country and still be considered to be involved in international marketing.” How? “If the company does business with the domestic subsidiaries of a multinational located in another country, it can still be considered involved in international marketing. And since over 70 percent of all companies in the United States either source from or count among their customers, international concerns,” in effect they are doing international business. Herbig calls the US “the last bastion of parochial beliefs,” and he notes that “even small companies are realizing they have only three options: go global, get out of the business, or go broke. International marketing, he says, “must exist for the survival of the firm, any firms, all firms.”
INTERNATIONAL MARKETING
Mistakes Do Have their Value Some people say that one of the best ways to learn is from our mistakes, while others say that the best teacher is not making the mistakes in the first place. Both are valid statements: Sometimes blunders—whether experienced or seen and avoided—lead to a change of course onto the right path; other times blunders prove to be expensive stumblings on a company’s downhill slope to eventual extinction. Either way, blunders teach lessons—some that seem almost choreographed. They can help smooth the road ahead.
Suffer the Little Children (Beech-Nut Nutrition Corporation) The top management at the Beech-Nut Nutrition Corporation once found themselves on the very pointy horns of a dilemma. Their “secret” was getting out and they had to make a decision, quickly. They—namely president and chief executive officer Niels Hoyvald and vice president of operations John Lavery—could admit publicly that the company’s apple juice sold to millions of babies around the world as “nutritious and wholesome” was a fraud, or they could try to hide the fact and continue to sell it to unsuspecting customers. Concluding that an admission of such magnitude would ruin a company that had prided itself on purity and quality, they opted for the latter.
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