After World War II, American multinational companies (MNCs) found
great opportunities in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. While marketing
was technically far less advanced than in the late 1990s, products were
adapted to local markets since production was often localized. Gradu-
ally, multinational marketing came to mean marketing to different coun-
tries with local adaptation of products and promotions. That certainly
contributed to the rise of new approaches in marketing disciplines. In
the end of the 1950s, market segmentation gave marketers a tool to di-
vide given markets into more homogeneous subgroups. The early 1960s
witnessed the conceptualization of the marketing mix with its "4Ps" of
marketing (product, price, promotion, and place). Starting in the late
1960s, product positioning enabled marketers to place a product or brand
in a specific location in the consumer's perceptual map of a product
category. Concurrently, marketing research techniques grew increasingly
sophisticated. ¹

The early 1970s saw the beginning of the global phase which involved
far more standardization of products and integration of activities across
countries than had been the case in the multinational phase. Due to the
energy crisis, inflation, and currency devaluation, international ventures
became less attractive to U.S. companies in the mid-1970s, while foreign
multinational corporations began to operate in the American market. As
Americans began driving Hondas, loading Konica cameras from Japan
with Fujitsu film, watching Sony televisions, and drinking beer from Ger-
many, U.S. industry lost one foothold after another in the technology
and consumer electronics sector. As U.S. big business retreated, Ameri-
can advertising was bound to follow.

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