INTERNATIONAL MARKETING MANAGEMENT

International Marketing Management



International Marketing Management

Executive Summary

Though Toyota co. is one of the top automobile companies that are running today. The Toyota co is so strong and innovating that there is constant improvement. But being in automobile business there is tuff competition going on. There are many more cars and companies that are preferred by people over Toyota. Three of the many companies that are direct competition are: Hyundai motors company, Honda motors company, Ford motors company.

The Hyundai Motor Company, a division of the Hyundai Automotive Group, is South Korea's largest car maker. It is headquartered in Seoul, South Korea. In 2005, the combined sales of the Hyundai KIA Automotive Group made it the world's sixth largest vehicle manufacturer. In Ulsan, South Korea Hyundai operates the world's largest integrated automobiles manufacturing facility which is capable of producing 1.6 million units annually. The Hyundai logo, a slanted, stylized 'H', is symbolic of two people (the company and customer) shaking hands and its official global tagline slogan is "Drive your way". Toyota has just become the world leading carmaker, leaving GM and the others behind. In the US, Toyota is investing, hiring employees, and making profits, while the US carmakers are cutting thousands of jobs and drowning into abyssal losses. An article by Charles Fishman1 highlights the features of the Toyota culture that explain this outstanding success. PART A

Introduction

Toyota's competitiveness is internal, self-critical. It is rooted in an institutional obsession with improvement, a pervasive lack of complacency with whatever was accomplished yesterday”, Fishman writes. This corroborates my own observations: weak organisations (and people) look at the outside to explain their misfortune. If they are not successful, it's because the competition is so strong, or because the boss is unfair, or because the employees are lazy, etc. It's always “the others”. This victimisation (“I am the product of external circumstances”) is at the opposite of far more empowering “I take responsibility for my life” philosophy, where people take responsibility for their situation and work on themselves self to improve it.

“Toyota doesn't have corporate convulsions, and it never has. It restructures a little bit every work shift.” “Continuous improvement is tectonic. By constantly questioning how you do things, you don't outflank your competition next quarter. Your outflank them next decade.” Myriads of micro improvements every day, rather than spectacular, bloody shake-ups (and often ineffective) reorganisations. Isn't that a very challenging idea indeed for those of us accustomed to endless organisational convulsions? The debate about the way in which cross-national meaning transfer can be realized most effectively has been going on for at least 45 years if not longer (M. Lorenzen 2006, 45-76). It is embedded in the more general issue of standardization of marketing programmes and processes (i.e. Levitt, ). More than 200 research articles dealing with cross-national advertising have been published over 40 years. Three schools of thought regarding cross-national advertising can be distinguished: standardization, adaptation, and compromise. Proponents of the standardization approach argue that because of a converging ...