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International Market Selection and Segmentation I
Edited by Nicolas Papadopoulos and Oscar Martín Martín
Introduction
International business is conducted in an increasingly globalized environment characterized by fewer barriers, growing competition, and greater opportunities for expansion. Still, notwithstanding the general trend to globalization, the particular environments in which a firm operates are the result of the various strategic decisions it takes throughout its internationalization process. One such strategic decision is the selection ([44] Root, 1994; [45] Sakarya et al. , 2007) or segmentation ([10] Day et al. , 1988; [49] Steenkamp and ter Hofstede, 2002) of international markets - namely, the decision by which firms choose the markets, whether defined geographically or otherwise, in which to be present.
We posit that at base both "selection" and "segmentation" decisions are, by definition, segmentation decisions in the traditional marketing sense. The difference between the two terms is conditioned, simply, by how "market" is defined. Typically, the term "selection" is used when the decision focuses on segmenting the world based on national country markets, while "segmentation" is used when the firm attempts to identify markets cross-nationally by drawing on characteristics that various types of buyers share regardless of where they live. Largely because of this distinction in the segmentation base used, these two fields have evolved over time as distinct streams in research. To confuse matters, both fields share the same acronym - and while both essentially deal with "segmentation", the "selection" stream was chronologically the first to evolve, thus laying claim to the acronym "IMS" - a most typical case of semantics-driven academic confusion if there ever was one!
For the purposes of this paper, we propose a distinction that we have also put forth recently elsewhere ([42] Papadopoulos et al. , 2011) between IMSel, for "selection", and IMSeg, for "segmentation". This leaves "IMS" as the generic term to apply to both decision types, with the meaning of the "S" being up to the reader's discretion. At the end of the day, whether one "selects" a market from among a set of countries or of cross-national segments, or "segments" the global market by country or by cross-national buyer groups, is a semantic issue. The decision task is the same in both cases, and what differs is the...