International Marketing

Good afternoon Mr. Milo Minder bender and fellow executives my name is Courtney, and today with the help of my colleagues Ahmad and Jason we will be presenting to you our research on how the internet has allowed some innovative companies to distribute their product or service internationally over the internet, or at least vastly improve the efficiency of their physical distribution process.

In this presentation we will provide examples from three companies: Expedia, Dell and Apple and highlight how their distribution processes have vastly improved thanks to the technological advances of the internet.

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To begin, distribution channels are the means by which goods and services are distributed from the manufacturer to the end user. These channels do vary from company owed to multiple independent intermediaries. While mostly unaffected at a domestic level, International distribution channels can be affected by cultural and historical practices, host country employment or patronage concerns and be used as a non -tariff barrier. Many transport methods are also used.

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There are two methods of distribution, Indirect and direct and due to the nature of the Internet and its ability to target users directly, the companies we will speak about have used direct distribution channels also keeping in mind that business to business distribution channels differ from business to consumer distribution channels as you can see behind me.

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There are both positive and negative aspects to Internet distribution. Some positive aspects are low cost overheads, high profit potential, rapid transactions, wide spread exposure, instantly global, always current and easy to adjust, can target segments, can gather market information at a much quicker rate with it being specific to users of certain sites, convenient with instant access for customer’s 24/7/365, can be cross sold with other sites, and provides free customer information. Some negative aspects would be spamming laws, no...