BRIBERY-INTERNATIONAL STRATEGIC MARKETING

Bribery-International Strategic Marketing

Bribery-International Strategic Marketing

Outline

Bribery in international markets is a fact of life that can lead to astonishment, bewilderment and misunderstanding for expatriates, at both organizational and personal levels. This article examines bribery from two viewpoints and tries to develop procedures to bridge them. The first viewpoint is relativist, accepting that different cultures have different ethical values and not imposing an expatriate's values onto another culture. The second viewpoint is universalist, averring that ethics apply anywhere in the world, and is based on psychological and economic grounds. To resolve these two approaches, it is suggested that trying to understand the cultural forces that determine home and overseas' attitudes to the many forms of bribery, is a first step to adjustment. The next step is the development of a global or regional code of conduct that allows flexibility within a 'gray' zone. The result could be an evolving code that adapts to the many dimensions of bribery for each country's situation, in a manner that is a negotiation between the cultural, psychological and economic values of an expatriate's organisation and of local officials.

Introduction

International marketing is complex because foreign environments are different from home environments; for example, they differ on physical, cultural, legalpolitical, economic, competitive and distributive dimensions (Ball and McCulloch 2006). Because of these environments, marketers can adapt parts of the marketing mix for each overseas country or region (Hoang 2007), for example, a company might alter its packaging, distribution channels and advertisements in each of its international markets.

These marketing mix issues are not the only ones facing international marketers. Cultural management issues are important and bribery is the most important of these, at least for Australian and US marketing managers (Armstrong et al. 2007). For example, should a firm pay a customs official to process a shipment through normal channels? Should a firm pay education expenses in its home country for the child of a prince in an overseas country that the firm wants to enter? Should payments to distributors be paid into two separate accounts when one is apparently illegal? Should funds in the public relations budget be paid to someone who appears to do nothing for public relations other than being related to someone in power? Issues like these are important to someone from a culture where these activities are unusual.

Nevertheless, little research has been done on the ethics of international marketing (Armstrong and Sweeney 2007) and interest in ethical issues in general has been mainly empirical (Donaldson 2004). Moreover, levels of corruption vary widely around the world (shown in a survey of 52 countries by Transparency International (2007)). Furthermore, the issue of bribery in particular is often considered within only one of the six different environments above. For example, bribery is sometimes discussed in the legal environment chapter of a textbook (for example, Keegan and Green 2007) where the effect of the United State's Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) on that country's ability to compete with Europe in international markets is covered ...