Standardisation, centralisation and marketing in multinational companies

Abstract

The literature on multinational companies (MNCs) seems to assume that when a company is centralised, it also implements identical marketing strategies. In other words, centralisation and marketing standardisation are assumed to be correlated. There is, however, very little empirical evidence to support this view. The study presented here investigates this issue, based on a mail survey of some 200 Australian subsidiaries of MNCs. A response rate of 52% enabled the researchers to conclude that standardisation is usually consistent across products and services within any one firm and, more surprisingly, that standardisation and centralisation are not correlated at the firm level, suggesting a review of a fundamental assumption made in the literature on multinational companies.