The Japanese “sogo shosha” – Japanese General Trading Companies – have played a major role in the phenomenal growth of the Japanese economy. Throughout the century, sogo shosha have secured raw material import inputs and have marketed and manufactured high value‐added exports of the...

Shows that traditional product mapping methods for product positioning analysis fail in international settings due to the high variability of product preferences within each country and the lack of a common product perception among countries. Shows how explicitly incorporating variation in the...

A survey of US‐based European and Japanese multinational firms, examining: the similarities and differences in product strategies used by these firms, and the relationship of their product strategies to a product’s sales growth rate in the US market. Shows that Japanese multinational firms...