Question

Your company manufactures and sells tennis rackets and would like to start selling outside the United States. You are in charge of developing a global Web strategy and the first countries you are thinking of targeting are Brazil, China, Germany, Italy, and Japan.

1. Using the statistics in the CIA World Fact Book, which of these countries would you target first? Provide rationale.

2. What criteria did you use?

3. What other considerations should you address in your Web strategy?

4. What features would you put on your Web site to attract buyers from the countries you target?

Answer 1

In order to develop a global Web strategy to start selling tennis rackets outside the United States, Germany would be targeted first followed by Italy. Since the global Web strategy needs to be developed, the Internet penetration also needs to be taken into account along with the population of the country. Germany has a higher Internet penetration at 89% and Italy at 61% with Germany having a greater population than Italy (hence hypothetically more sales). The reason being that even though Germany ranks 33rd based on the popularity of tennis with Italy ranked 10th among the list of countries mentioned above, the proximity of Germany to France and UK (associated with hosting Tennis tournaments) lends credence of targeting Germany before Italy (translated to the popularity of tennis and buying of tennis rackets).