Pizza Huts in the land of Pushkin? Oreo cookies in Omsk? Big Macs in Belgrade? Yes, all that-and more. Maybe.
American companies have long viewed doing business with the Soviet Union as a dubious proposition, given the stormy politics of the superpower relationship. But under perestroika, General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's campaign to revitalize his country's economy, the Soviets are trying to attract American know-how to help step up the tempo of development. Encouraged by their overtures, dozens of U.S. companies-among them Honeywell, Occidental Petroleum and Archer Daniels Midland-are forming joint ventures in the Soviet Union ....
The official warming trend even revived the often sleepy U.S.-U.S.S.R. Trade and Economic Council, a group of 315 U.S. companies and 150 Soviet enterprises and ministries, which staged a four-day conference in Moscow in April to talk about prospective joint ventures. In a display of Madison Avenue glitz, council members from the U.S. gave their Soviet counterparts a crash course in marketing that included razzle-dazzle TV commercials for Diet Coke, NutraSweet and the American Express Card ....
Several industrial agreements have been signed since November. In the first of these ventures, Connecticut-based Combustion Engineering will provide machinery and software for managing petroleum production at refineries. Minnesota's Honeywell will equip Soviet fertilizer plants with high-tech manufacturing equipment. Occidental Petroleum will build two factories to supply plastics for food packaging, vinyl floors and other uses. Chevron is discussing an oil-exploration venture, while Monsanto is negotiating joint production of a weed-killing herbicide.
Economic detente with the Soviets has spawned consumer-oriented ventures as well. For the past two weeks, Muscovites have been lining up to buy slices of the first American pizza in the Soviet Union, for 1.25 rubles ($2.10) each at the AstroPizza truck that makes stops around the city. The 18-ft. mobile pizzeria is operated under a joint venture of New Jersey-based Roma Food Enterprises (1987 sales: $100 million) and the City of Moscow.
SOURCE: Janice Castro, "Perestroika to Pizza," Time, May 2, 1988, 52-53.
"marketing on a worldwide basis" has come to mean "marketing with a universal, standardized approach worldwide." As the Global Media Commission of the International Advertising Association explains in the foreword to its Global Marketing report:
It's the breakthrough tool of the '80s, and it's going to transform the advertising and television industries in the decades to come.
Global marketing is a simple name for a complex new approach to worldwide business. Some experts think the concept spells the end of multinational corporations as they know them today. Global marketing means selling inexpensive, high-quality, reliable products. Selling the same products in all the nations of the world. And selling them with highly unified marketing techniques. No longer will there be a different advertising campaign for each country or each language of the world. Increasingly, products and their marketing support systems will be truly global.
Why now? Why should business practices that always have been theoretically possible seem so urgently in need of development? Because of television, the undisputed heavyweight champion of advertising. 1
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