International Marketing Strategies for a Cultural Service

The role of culture in international marketing strategies for a widely traded cultural service, television programming, is examined. The focus is on how non‐US television programme producers can exploit opportunities in the foreign marketplace by adopting a marketing approach that analyses the needs of foreign buyers and audiences in terms of the options available for segmenting the market. One approach is to identify a cross‐national segment where the producer possesses a competitive advantage. Another is to offer customised attributes desired by viewers in a major foreign market. An international coalition helps assure this. Paradoxically we find that this strategy may not always be inconsistent with standardisation.