The Mirage Of Global Markets

The Mirage of Global Markets, the product of the research, teaching, and publishing associated with the MBA International Marketing Management course at Harvard Business School, is a set of essays addressing the challenges facing companies attempting to globalize. The context of these essays forms itself around the author's view of two essential aspects of the global arena: First, companies tend to treat the international market as though it were an extension of their current business and a source of incremental revenues for existing products/services. Accordingly, they view international markets as opportunities to increase existing sales and adopt a "sales push," rather than a market-driven approach. Second, though companies are globalizing and their products are being distributed in more and more countries, this does not mean that markets are globalizing. Because of the innovations of information technology, they are, in fact, fragmenting into thousands of intensely local markets.