In assessing international marketing opportunities for initial market entry, firms have
typically adopted a sequential approach, focusing first on macro-level data and then
selecting a limited number of countries to examine in more depth (Cavusgil, 1985;
Papadopoulos and Denis, 1988; Kumar et al., 1994; Craig and Douglas, 2005). While
this approach provides a basis for ranking countries in terms of relative attractiveness,
further data need to be collected to identify potential target customers or market
segments and develop an effective marketing strategy to target such customers.
Countries may be similar in terms of macro-economic factors such as the level of
economic development or urbanization, but vary dramatically in terms of other
contextual factors such as regional and cultural variation within-country, or the nature
of the marketing and retail infrastructure. These have an important impact on target
market selection, as well as the formulation of marketing strategies. Further, as
markets expand and become more complex, firms are developing finely tuned