Polysil International Marketing Strategy

1.1. Background

The international marketing is enhanced by the need of understanding the similarities and the differences of the markets in different countries. Therefore, to be able to create a strong competitive advantage, it is required to keep in mind how important it is to have the right brand positioning in mind.

Keller, Sternthal & Tybout describe the brand positioning as a strategy that will determine the place that a certain brand will have in a market in order to obtain a different consumer perception, to develop competitive advantages and strengths over other similar brands and define the type of the targeted consumer segments; The positioning will set the base for the marketing strategy.

A brand can be represented by a combination

As an example, by 2015, although Polysil was having an annual turnover of around 50 million USD and the customers were already international, the company did not have a Marketing Department. This means that most of the business was attracted through “guanxi”, through recommendations from other customers and by participating to trade fairs were both suppliers and buyers can meet for business. However, although this proved to work better in the domestic market, for foreign development this channel would be too costly and inefficient as we will discuss in a later

Considering that the author is personally involved in the company, he has access to in-depth interviews with company executives and customers as well as access to inside statistics and data regarding revenue, costs and profits. In order to increase reliability the following two criteria were set for selection of the managers to be interviewed; (1) managers must posses international experience on the behalf of Polysil Group. (2) the managers must have worked for Polysil Group for more than 5 years and must have a good understanding of the corporate culture and brand development. (3) the interviews followed the same protocol but the questions were adapted to each respondent according to its experience. In order to guarantee a high level of reliability, after the interviews have been conducted, all the compiled interviews have been double checked with the respondents to make sure the information was correct and that there was no wrongful interpretations. Moreover, relevant information from other secondary sources is also used with the interview materials to enhance a better picture. Most of the secondary data used comes from company presentations, company financial reports and other company online