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Realize Opportunities


International Marketing Strategies Built upon Analysis and Creativity

The first phase in realizing opportunities involves identifying the best opportunities to pursue. IMS consults with your marketing and sales teams, surveys prospective and existing clients, and conducts public market research in order to determine the perceived strengths and weaknesses of your offerings. At the end of the day, your goal is to maximize sales margins and marketing ROI. Doing so globally is significantly more complex, with typical issues of market size, competition, prices and accessibility accompanied by additional challenges: local tastes, language, import barriers.

Once opportunities arise, IMS prepares companies for entry by advising executives on business customs, protocol and cultural norms. Additionally, we work with companies to refine or reposition brands and plan marketing activity based on the foreign markets' or specific opportunities identified. IMS thus insures logos, taglines, product trademarks, color schemes and other materials properly address a target market's expectations while avoiding negative cultural references.

Via its mix of global offices and local partnerships, IMS' full team brings understanding of local expectations to the planning process, allowing us to avoid blunders and validate clients' conclusions about their planned marketplace and strategy.


Marketing materials: Implementing the strategy

IMS implements global marketing strategies that combine partnership development with and local direct sales. In fact, IMS has assisted hundreds of medium to large U.S. and European corporations develop export opportunities since 1986 by locating distributors and partners in the United States, Western, Central and Eastern Europe. IMS additionally provides its own distribution network for select products, where appropriate.

Our globally situated consultants and sales staff can work with senior management to locate partners and manage such relationships through understanding of native business customs, as well as familiarity with the business environment, players, regulations and other knowledge gained through years of business in various regions. At the same time, our global presence permits us to work closely, and locally with you and your company so that we fully understand your goals and can articulate foreign challenges clearly.

In addition to sales and marketing on the ground, IMS employs talented teams of artists, graphic designers, and project managers via its subsidiary, Polar Design. This team is capable of developing localized corporate presentations, web sites and print collateral to captivate potential foreign customers, partners or investors into accepting your company's message. As past accomplishment demonstrate, our presentations succeed due to careful use of local symbology, colors, design tastes and copy writing that keep your localized "story" and message as coherent as the original.


Placement and measurement: Evaluating success

Careful placement of effort and advertising in addition to thorough measurement of results are essential ingredients to maximum marketing ROI. Placement internationally begins with strong listings in foreign search engines for your local-language product web sites and extends to advertising in targeted trade journals, hosting of conferences, local direct sales or more complex marketing campaigns. Your firm may need to meet high-ranking executives in North American or Europe, or seek to dramatically increase broader awareness of its products - in any case, IMS has experience and skill to accomplish this through conferences, symposia, advertising or Internet marketing.

Yet placement is not enough without some determination of its effectiveness along the way. Since marketing events, print and web advertising can generate audience feedback in a number of ways, companies must capitalize on this information by capturing and evaluating it in order to judge the effectiveness their international marketing strategy. In international marketing, this involves capturing and analyzing standard customer data as well as information related to a number of unusual categories (e.g., cultural, linguistic, and geographic information).

IMS achieves measurement through a range of statistical analysis tools, customer response databases and software provided by Polar Design as well as 3d party developers. We also insure careful planning of print materials and other media to insure that as much data about the source of feedback can be obtained. The result is that customer behavior as a result of print, media or the web is tracked and the corresponding campaign evaluated in real-time, permitting IMS to respond rapidly to results and tune international marketing activity in order to achieve the best possible marketing ROI.