One of my favorite professors from my Global MBA program, Professor Simonin, and his colleagues were recently recognized by the American Marketing Association as 2023’s most significant contribution to the advancement of International Marketing Management for their research on performance gains when improving an organization’s International Marketing Agility.
The research paper titled “Marketing Agility in Subsidiaries: Market Orientation and Marketing Program Standardization as the “Twin Engines” of Performance“ presents International Marketing Agility (IMA) as a strategic capability that enables multinational corporations (MNCs) to navigate the tension between global integration and local responsiveness seamlessly. This concept highlights the ability of subsidiaries to swiftly adapt to dynamic market conditions by leveraging local insights while maintaining the efficiencies of standardized marketing programs. IMA reflects an organization’s capacity to identify, anticipate, and respond to international opportunities and threats flexibly and quickly, ensuring global consistency and local relevance.
Professors Simonin, Ozsomer, and Mandler position Market Orientation (MO), a deep understanding of the local market and Marketing Program Standardization (MPS), infrastructure, and brand consistency as complementary forces they refer to as the “twin engines” of performance. By focusing on IMA, organizations foster dynamic interplay where subsidiaries can act on deep local market understanding while capitalizing on globally tested strategies and assets. This agility is particularly critical in an era of increasing global interdependence and market volatility, where balancing local and global priorities defines competitive success.
Key Research Findings
- Adapting to Local Market Needs Increases Performance – They demonstrated that a company’s responsiveness in gathering and disseminating market intelligence and, more importantly, responding to local market needs directly improves profitability and market share in both advanced and emerging markets.
- Strategically Adopt Standardized Marketing Programs—Deploying globally standardized marketing programs can enable a level of efficiency and brand consistency that positively impacts performance in advanced markets but can negatively impact profitability in emerging markets due to local market mismatches, often caused by the rigidity of the one-size-fits-all mindset.
- Focus on the Interplay of MO and MPS—The best outcomes (International Marketing Agility) were achieved when local management success was directly aligned to how rapidly and effectively they could adapt both global and local strategies to seize opportunities and mitigate threats by blending local market knowledge with scale and execution efficiencies.
Key Action Points
- Develop Agility as a Core Capability: Organizations must Integrate local market knowledge and standardization into strategic planning to balance global efficiency with local responsiveness. Leadership must foster a culture that enables and empowers agility in decision-making to pivot quickly in dynamic markets.
- Tailor Strategies to Market Context: Understand that no one size fits all, and based on the research, organizations should prioritize standardization in advanced markets for efficiency and global brand alignment. Conversely, local market needs responsiveness is critical for success in emerging markets to address local nuances and customer needs.
- Invest in Local Market Insights: Strengthen intelligence gathering and dissemination in subsidiaries to align marketing strategies with local market realities. I will add that any differing local insights must be shared with a wider audience to leverage this differing insight as a potential competitive advantage yet to be discovered in other markets.
- Foster Global-Local Collaboration: Management at all levels must enable and encourage markets to leverage MNC-wide resources while maintaining the flexibility to adapt locally. The MNC must create systems to share best practices across all markets.
- Avoid Overstandardization: Ensure responsiveness mechanisms are in place to counterbalance the rigidity of MNC standardized programs, particularly in culturally or economically distinct markets. The research demonstrated distinct differences in the breadth of implementation of MO and MPS levers in advanced and emerging markets, which must be understood.
- Train Subsidiary Leadership: Equip managers at the global and market levels with the skills to manage the dual pressures of global alignment and local adaptation.
- Measure and Adjust: Regularly evaluate the impact of the alignment on market performance metrics like profitability and market share and ensure that market-specific data is factored into the reviews to refine marketing strategies.
Applying the Twin Engines to Web Development at MNCs
As I read their paper, I found many alignments with the strategies and recommendations I have advocated as a global digital transformation consultant. Unfortunately, at my engagement level of the ecosystem, nearly every MNC I have worked with has viewed local market requirements as stubborn and wanting to control their message. The regional market teams resented having web infrastructure forced upon them by their corporate overlords. This has resulted in these twin engines as antagonistic forces, directly opposing and actively working against one another rather than collaborating to increase market performance exponentially.
There should be no argument that digital marketing and websites are critical to multinationals’ initial engagement and sales process; these websites, much like the broader go-to-market strategies in the professor’s research, require a balance between global standardization for efficiency and consistency and local customization to meet specific market needs. Part two of this article will apply these concepts to the MNC digital ecosystem.
