Internet and Globalization - I

Globalization and internet has introduced a new set of problems for the marketers. No longer is it just enough to make a good product and create the right hype. It also becomes important to release the product simultaneously. In the following blogs I will look at how this has fundamentally affected the way marketers are forced to look at their markets and some mistakes that they still make.

Let us look of the paradigm shifts. In the past, the Hollywood production houses used to release the movie first in US, then in Europe and later on in Asia. This worked well for them, since they were able to use the earnings from one continent to market the movie in another.

In todays scenario, marketing does not happen in one continent alone, whether they like it not. They create the hype in America and people in India anticipate it. To make matters worse, after the introduction of the internet, they started noticing that pirated versions of the movies started becoming available soon enough in the other continents and waiting for a month before the release of the movie in the other continent meant that they lost out on a sizable chunk of box office revenues.

Matrix Reloaded was the first movie to be released on the same day world-wide. I attribute a large amount of the credit for the box office earnings that this movie had to this one fact.

In this day and age of internet and blogs, it does not take a lot of effort for a marketer to spread word about a product (be it movies or computer or whatever). The hype gets communicated across the globe quite quickly once the information gets onto the internet. The saying 'Word spreads like fire', has become quite literal in the internet age; in fact it spread faster and wider, than any fire ever can. This makes timing the launch and doing it simultaneously, very important. Marketers are waking up to this fact. This has also resulted in a lot of pressure being put on the financial requirements for marketing. Though there are those who manage to find synergies in this as well.

It is important to realise the reality that is internet and how it affects businesses.