ICOM 2013 - International Conference on Marketing - Challenging Environment 2013

The environment creates many opportunities for marketers; creation of new services that exploit its power, new mechanisms for promotion and marketing tactics, and new channels for building relationships with suppliers, business partners, channel members and customers. Indeed, the exploration of these positive elements associated with the integration of environment, marketing strategy represents potentially valuable contributions to marketing research. Papers investigating such issues are encouraged for submission.

Environment poses new challenges, such as Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, Legal & Ethical. Certainly, the Environment poses delicate to challenges for any company that serves diverse markets, but particularly when those markets are at different stages of development.
Offering different products, pricing, and promotional messages to diverse segments becomes more complex and hot. When information can be transmitted so quickly and at a bargain price, customers and business partners have greater ability to compare marketing strategies directed to them with those deployed elsewhere.

Such comparisons between emerging and developed markets can be particularly problematic because there are valid reasons why the market offering may vary substantially. The needs, capabilities and finances of marketers and customers in emerging markets differ greatly from those in developed countries. Physical, social and legal infrastructures are diverse. Emerging markets face issues of exploding growth and tremendous opportunity. In developed countries, demographic trends, economic crises, and concerns about new competitors from emerging markets generate insecurity regarding long-term competitiveness. The challenge in these countries isn't managing unstable growth. The question is: Will the recent crises lead to stagnation or will marketers and customers recover in economic activity and stable, to long-term growth? Disregarding such critical differences while superficially comparing marketing strategies can lead to negative reactions.

The study of Marketing for challenging environment; welcome for papers, encourage submissions regarding emerging markets that develop theory, identify and address shortcomings in the generalizability of widely-accepted theory or findings, or highlight unexamined or under-researched topics.