Parker Pen Company

1. Was the proposed globalization strategy for Parker Pen flawed or merely plagued by implementation challenges?

The proposed globalization strategy for Parker Pen was both flawed and merely plagued by implementation challenges.

Globalization differs in three basic ways:

• The global approach looks for similarities between markets. • The global approach actively seeks homogeneity in products, image, marketing, and advertising message. • The global approach asks, “Should this product or process be for world consumption?”

So globalization requires many internal modifications and also keep the lines of communications open.

In 1982, the company was struggling, and global marketing was one of the key measures to be used to revive the company. When you read the case, you can interpret that Parker made some wrong implementations:

what Parker did, was to sell the same products internationally. They stayed with its previous strategy and continued marketing its top-of-the-line pens through department stores and stationery stores. To implement the centralized marketing concept by assuming all markets are the same was wrong, thought it is only a slight one, adaption is needed if you want to succeed in globalization. They did not think about the consequences. Of course every global brand is made with the same formula, brand identity, but each market in the world is approached differently. What they had to do is learn from their overseas divisions.

A global marketing strategy involves that Parker has to think in an integrated way about all the aspects in their business. They had to think global, that was the most important, but they also had to know the local and cultural differences.

The power and influence concentrate at the headquarters in Wisconsin, but they let country operations have poor communication links between them. What they had to do was to integrate the communication between the headquarters and