Article Critique: International Marketing

Main Points and Arguments

The article does a literature review of major scholarly articles that research on marketing capabilities in international markets and how different these capabilities are from those of domestic markets. The author first looks at the classifications and argues that classifying the market capabilities into levels is the most comprehensive framework. There exist three levels of marketing capabilities (Morgan, Fend, & Whitler, 2018) . The first is lower-level marketing capabilities which take the characteristics of specialized functional marketing processes that have been used to design the individual marketing mix (the four Ps of marketing) related activities. Research about lower-level marketing capabilities on a global scale has been focused on firm-level capabilities, especially in areas of advertising, product management in foreign markets, and marketing communications.

The second level is midlevel marketing capabilities. Their characteristics revolve around strategic marketing capabilities and architecture. These characteristics include marketing sensing, strategy implementation capabilities, and marketing strategy planning. The most researched midlevel capabilities on the global scene are marketing sensing capabilities. The third level is referred to as higher-level marketing capabilities. Such capabilities have not been researched in great depth since firm-level marketing capabilities are what most organizations find important. Higher-level marketing capabilities are not easy to observe and measure hence most studies relating to them only analyze cases.

The author further conducted interviews to dig deeper into this topic. The results obtained indicated that the conceptual and empirical knowledge of marketing capabilities still have important gaps that should be filled (Day, 2011) . The first issue that needs to be addressed is whether international marketing capabilities and domestic ones are different. If they are, research needs to figure what brings about the differences. Initial qualitative works by the author indicate that the differences exist. What is not clear is whether different approaches should be used for the two capabilities or if more complex versions of the approaches used in domestic capabilities will apply to international marketing capabilities.

My Opinion of the Article

With the exponential improvement in technology, businesses are no longer leveraging domestic markets alone. Startups are coming up with the ambition to make their ideas global. This article is eye-opening as it shows that there is a difference in how international and domestic marketing capabilities are approached. Based on the literature review done by the authors, the article indicates that the differences are yet to be identified. This opens up a wide area of research for business people and more specifically, marketers. However, the research done was only limited to major scholarly articles on marketing capabilities. This is a weakness as there is a lot of scholarly articles that may not be major but have important information regarding the subject matter. In my opinion, this article is perfect as it addresses an issue that major scholarly articles fail to address. However, I think much more research should have been done by maybe asking scholars in the field of marketing who may have researched the subject matter to submit their works.

Application to the Lesson

This article hints at how important the elements of the marketing mix are to businesses. These elements are usually taught at the beginning of the course and tend to be taken lightly by the learners. However, the article clearly shows that concepts such as marketing mix, marketing orientation, and organizational structure are crucial to both domestic and international firms. Secondly, the fact that there is a difference between the two marketing capabilities means that the basic concepts being talked about in this context should be twitched to meet the requirements for the different capabilities.

Reference

Day, G. S. (2011). Closing the marketing capabilities gap.  Journal of marketing ,  75 (4), 183-195.

Morgan, N. A., Feng, H., & Whitler, K. A. (2018). Marketing capabilities in international marketing.  Journal of International Marketing ,  26 (1), 61-95.