31 American Things That Look A Whole Lot Different In Other Countries

Ideally, companies would only have to come up with a great product and a convincing marketing program and they would have a worldwide winner. But despite the obvious advantages they could gain, many fear that global marketing, as popularly defined, is too extreme to be practical. Mainly due to the fact that customers and competitive conditions differ across countries or because powerful local managers will not stand for centralized decision making.

So they choose market segmentation. It's the process of dividing a market of potential customers into groups, or segments, based on different characteristics. The segments created are composed of consumers who will respond similarly to marketing strategies and who share traits such as similar interests, needs, or in our case, locations.

Geographic segmentation is actually one of the most common and straightforward types of market segmentation.