Assessing Global Markets: Identifying international market opportunities

Introduction

Microlending has become well established as a successful economic development strategy in emerging markets. The technique involves making relatively small, unsecured personal loans to low-income entrepreneurs to develop business models that benefit local communities. By providing products and services adapted to local markets, borrowers are able to establish profitable businesses on a relatively small scale, which they can then expand to larger opportunities.

In many cases, these programs target women who traditionally have lacked the educational, social, and economic opportunities of men. Those who achieve initial success face the challenge of managing the growth process for their expanding businesses. This requires a skill set of managerial, financial, and marketing capabilities that is difficult to acquire.

Personal Management Training, Inc. (PMT), is a producer of electronic management training systems for professionals wishing to enhance their managerial skills. The firm's newest product is MicroEntrepreneur, a computer-based system that integrates educational exercises with marketing and accounting software to facilitate market planning for client entrepreneurs.

The firm has developed a version of this system targeted to the needs of small-scale businesses in developing countries. The system is designed to operate on the small, durable, reliable, and inexpensive notebook systems that have been widely distributed in those countries. It wishes to offer this system to women who have been successful in microlending programs and desire to grow their enterprises to larger-scale operations.

Janice Stevens, the firm's CEO, has tasked you, PMT's marketing director, to screen the world's countries to identify the most attractive target countries for this product. Based on the nature of the product and its target customers, Janice wishes to target low- to middle-income countries with high percentages of women in the work force of whom a significant percentage are self-employed. Among target countries, those with the highest populations would be the most attractive initial markets. Janice also believes it would be beneficial to concentrate on a single geographic area of the world with common cultural characteristics if possible.

You will use web-based data visualization and spatial analysis tools to identify the countries that best match these target criteria.

Location

The world and its countries

Time to complete the lab

60 to 90 minutes

Prerequisites

An understanding of the importance of international market assessment in the process of developing global marketing strategies

Access to Gapminder.org with a web browser

Data used in this lab

Demographic and socioeconomic data at the country level