International Marketing

These are serious investment decisions made by top management after multiple rounds of research entailing large amounts of efforts and resources. How were the mistakes made anyway? How could they have avoided making such mistakes in the

first place?

Tunnel vision, hubris, pressure to expand- There is no shortage of reasons why failure in business could occur, but these are the initial thoughts that come to mind. I see a scenario where a company has much success domestically and in a few foreign markets that they believe so strongly in their launch formula, resulting in blindspots to specific issues within the market they are attempting to enter (i.e., cultural).

The executive could be experiencing pressure from the board or stockholders to grow the business, and with desperation can come lousy decision-making. Lastly, there is the issue of tunnel vision. Starbucks' focused on developing its business in Vietnam. I wonder if they had tunnel vision knowing that the Vietnamese coffee market was so large that they wanted to capture some of it, even though their western brand was very different from what the locals wanted to consume (or could afford) regularly.

Linking back to the Canadian company Tim Horton’s failure in the U.S., aren’t the U.S., U.K. and Canada culturally, politically, and economically similar to each other? If it’s so difficult to cross expand among these three countries, isn’t it a lot more difficult for companies to enter a culturally distant country such as China and Japan? Why or why not?

The U.S., U.K., and Canada are culturally, politically, and economically similar. However, they are not carbon copies of each other, much like we saw Best Buy collapse in the U.K. While the U.S. and U.K. are similar, we have different shopping patterns. Tim Horton's has failed in the U.S. largely due to the over-saturation of the coffee and donut market. The market is just "too competitive," as shared by the interviewee in the CNBC video. Much of the success in international expansion, no matter how far or culturally different, was because there was space for the business to thrive. A less saturated market leaves less competition for a company to have success.