Comprehensive Business & Marketing Foundations: International Business, Strategy, Research, and Consumer Behaviour

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering global trade and institutions, international business environments, marketing strategy, research methods, and consumer behavior analysis across all lecture topics.

Globalization of Markets

The merging of historically distinct and separate national markets into one huge global marketplace.

Globalization of Production

The sourcing of goods and services from locations around the globe to take advantage of national differences in the cost and quality of factors of production.

Outward Stock of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)

The total cumulative value of foreign investments by firms domiciled in a nation outside of their home borders.

World Trade Organization (WTO)

An international body responsible for policing the world trading system and ensuring that nation-states adhere to the rules established in international treaties.

Common Law

A legal system grounded in tradition, precedent, and custom, granting judges the flexibility to interpret statutes to fit the specific circumstances of an individual case.

Civil Law

A legal system based on a detailed set of laws organized into comprehensive codes, where judges apply the existing law without the authority to interpret or establish legal precedents.

Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA)

A law that makes it illegal to bribe a foreign government official to obtain or maintain business and mandates that public companies maintain financial records detailing potential violations.

Purchasing Power Parity (PPP)

An economic adjustment to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that accounts for differences in the cost of living between countries to enable direct comparisons of living standards.

Human Development Index (HDI)

A measure of the quality of human life across nations evaluated on three criteria: life expectancy at birth, educational attainment, and whether average incomes are sufficient to satisfy basic life needs.

Folkways

Routine conventions and customs of everyday life that are expected to be followed but carry no severe moral sanctions or formal punishment if violated.

Mores

Norms seen as central to the functioning of a society and its social life that carry significant moral weight; violating them can lead to severe social backlash or legal penalties.

Power Distance

Hofstede's cultural dimension that measures how a society addresses inequalities in physical and intellectual capabilities, scoring high in societies that allow social and economic inequalities to grow over time.

Uncertainty Avoidance

Hofstede's cultural dimension measuring the extent to which members of a society are socialized to tolerate ambiguity and accept unstructured or uncertain situations.

Cultural Relativism

The philosophical belief that ethics are merely an expression of a culture and that multinational firms should simply adopt whatever ethical norms exist within the host country where they operate.

Friedman Doctrine

The business ethics position asserting that the sole social responsibility of business is to maximize profits for stockholders, provided the enterprise stays within the legal boundaries of the law.

Comparative Advantage

David Ricardo's trade theory stating that a country should specialize in the production of those goods it produces most efficiently and purchase from other countries goods it produces less efficiently, even if it could produce them more efficiently itself.

Heckscher-Ohlin Theory

An international trade theory arguing that comparative advantage stems from differences in national factor endowments (land, labor, and capital), predicting that nations export goods that intensively use locally abundant resources.

Leontief Paradox

The empirical finding that despite being relatively abundant in capital compared to other nations, exports from the United States were less capital-intensive than U.S. imports.

New Trade Theory

A trade theory postulating that nations specialize in particular products due to scale economies and first-mover advantages rather than underlying factor endowments, because world markets can only support a limited number of profitable firms.

Porter's Diamond

A conceptual framework identifying four broad national attributes that determine competitive advantage: factor endowments, domestic demand conditions, related and supporting industries, and firm strategy, structure, and rivalry.

Local Content Requirement

A government regulation requiring that a specific fraction of a physical good or its total monetary value be manufactured domestically rather than imported.

Quota Rent

The excess profit earned by domestic or foreign producers when market supply is artificially constrained by an import quota.

Strategic Trade Policy

Government intervention that uses targeted subsidies to help domestic enterprises establish first-mover advantages in emerging industries or overcome foreign barriers to entry.

Exploratory Research

Initial marketing research conducted to help clearly define the nature of a problem, generate working hypotheses, and shape future research design.

Secondary Data

Information that already exists in internal or external databases having been collected previously for purposes other than the specific study at hand.

Competitive Intelligence

The legal and ethical collection of public information (such as job postings and patent filings) to infer competitors' capabilities, operations, and upcoming strategic moves.

Ethnography

A qualitative observational research method where researchers monitor and record consumers engaging in behaviors and making decisions within their natural environments.

Synthetic Respondents

Artificially generated consumer profiles produced by generative AI from existing datasets to simulate how demographic segments would respond to marketing surveys.

Digital Twins

Virtual models of individual consumers developed from specific behavioral patterns and purchasing histories to test and simulate responses to products or surveys.

Market Orientation

A business philosophy centered on researching customer wants and needs first, then designing and pricing products that satisfy those specific requirements.

Value Cocreation

A collaborative marketing approach in which companies actively involve customers in designing, customizing, or submitting new product concepts.

True Friends

A customer relationship category referring to high-loyalty, high-profitability consumers who represent the optimal segment for long-term company investment and retention.

Barnacles

A customer relationship category describing highly loyal customers who yield low profitability because their spending amounts do not justify the costs of maintaining them.

Strategic Business Unit (SBU)

A subgroup or division of a business evaluated independently on two key criteria: market growth rate (market attractiveness) and relative market share.

Cash Cow

An SBU in the BCG portfolio matrix that holds a high relative market share in a mature, low-growth industry, generating significant financial returns that fund other units.

Market Penetration

A corporate growth strategy in the product/market expansion grid focusing on increasing sales of existing products to existing consumer market segments.

Market Development

A growth strategy in the product/market expansion grid that involves introducing current products to new customer segments or unexplored geographic regions.

Diversification

A growth strategy in the product/market expansion grid involving the creation or acquisition of entirely new products targeted at entirely new consumer markets.

Generation Z (Digital Natives)

The demographic cohort born between 1997 and 2012 that grew up with digital technology, prioritizes social and climate activism, and relies heavily on AI tools for shopping decisions.

Baby Boomers

The demographic cohort born between 1946 and 1964 characterized by high disposable wealth, distinct media habits, and a higher tendency to accept information presented by marketers or shared online.

Compensatory Decision Rule

A consumer evaluation framework in which an individual trades off good product features against poor ones, allowing positive attributes to compensate for negative ones.

Noncompensatory Decision Rule

A consumer evaluation framework in which a product must meet strict predetermined cutoff criteria on specific attributes, without permitting any trade-offs among features.

Postpurchase Dissonance

An internal psychological tension or buyer's remorse experienced after making a purchase decision, especially common with expensive, risky, or infrequent buys.

ABC Model of Attitudes

A psychological model proposing that consumer attitudes consist of three interrelated elements: Affective (feelings), Behavioral (actions or intentions), and Cognitive (beliefs and knowledge).

Aspirational Reference Group

A social group to which an individual does not belong but desires to join or emulate in their consumption choices, lifestyle, and values.

Dissociative Reference Group

A social group with which an individual actively seeks to avoid association, prompting them to avoid purchasing brands or products tied to that group.

Mission Statement

A formal, forward-looking statement of an organization's purpose that establishes what it aims to achieve in the broader marketplace, who it serves, and what value it offers.

SWOT Analysis

A strategic planning tool used to evaluate an organization's internal Strengths and Weaknesses alongside external Opportunities and Threats in the marketplace.

Positioning

The strategic effort to arrange for a brand or product to occupy a clear, distinctive, and desirable place relative to competitors in the minds of targeted consumers.

Return on Marketing Investment (Marketing ROI)

The measurement of net financial return generated by marketing investments relative to their cost, tracked through business performance indicators and customer-centered metrics.