International Marketing Research Challenges - Explained
Why International Marketing Research is Difficult?
Written by J. Mance Gordon
Updated at April 17th, 2024
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Why International Marketing Research is Difficult?
Notable difficulties in International Marketing include:
- Customer Understanding
- Language Issues
- Technical issues
- Cultural Issues
Each of these is discussed below.
Customer Understanding
In particular trying to understand the customer or the consumers in an international market. Often, we have to conduct international marketing research. That does come with some specific challenges or hurdles that we have to overcome.
Language Issues
One language issue is translating our materials. Whether it's a survey or interview questions or even an advertisement, translating those things into the native language in another country can prove really challenging. Often, things just don't translate literally. So, we have to translate and then back translate to make sure that the meaning doesn't change. That can be really critical to getting our message across.
Technical Issues
Next is technological issues. We don't have the same levels of technology everywhere in the world. While that level of technology is probably rising almost everywhere, we're not all starting from the same place.
So, if we plan to use any real level of technology in conducting our marketing research, we'd better make sure that that level of technology is supported in the market that we're going into.
Cultural Issues
Another issue that we have to consider are just broad cultural issues. People from certain cultures are going to be much more willing to engage in discussions with us about our product or our brand or other marketing issues than certain people from other cultures. That is, some cultures are reluctant to answer fully or tell you what you want to hear.
Related Topics
- Marketing Research Overview
- Quantitative and Qualitative Research
- Primary Research
- Secondary Research
- Determining the Right Marketing Strategy
- What is a Marketing Information System?
- What are Decision Support Systems?
- What are Marketing Models?
- What is a Marketing Dashboard?
- What Kinds of Data can we Use?
- Methods of Collecting Data
- What are Focus Groups?
- What is Group Think?
- What are Scanner Data?
- What is Web Tracking?
- What is Ethnography?
- What is Experimental` Research?
- What is Use of Statistics
- What Distorts the Results of Marketing Research?
- Challenges of International Market Research?