International Marketing

Cateora, Chapter 1

This chapter answers four questions. Why does every company now have to think internationally? What exactly is international marketingDoing the normal work of marketing, deciding on product, price, promotion and distribution, but for customers in more than one country.The ideas of marketing are the same everywhere. What changes is the surroundings you have to work in, and that is what this whole book is about., and how is it different from marketing at home? What makes it hard? And how deeply should a company get involved abroad?

Why international markets matter

The book begins with a confession. Twenty-five years ago the authors predicted that the world was becoming one single economy. They did not see 9/11 coming, or SARS, or the 2008 financial crash, or Brexit, or Trump, or COVID-19, or the war in Ukraine. World trade fell 11 percent in 2009, 13 percent between 2014 and 2016, and about 10 percent in 2020.

The lesson they draw is simple: expect the unexpected. You still plan and you still forecast, but international markets will surprise you. The company that survives is the flexible one. Flexibility comes from two things: strong relationships with partners abroad, and a spread of different businesses, so that one shock does not sink everything.

Even so, four long-term trends will keep pushing business across borders, whatever the bumps along the way:

• The growth of the World Trade OrganizationThe international organization, created in 1994, that sets trade rules for its 164 member countries, hears disputes and issues binding decisions.The key contrast with GATT: GATT was an agreement with advisory panels; the WTO is an institution whose decisions members must follow. It still has no police, but the winner of a case may hit back with sanctions. and of free trade agreements between countries. More rules, fewer barriers.
• Developing countries in Latin America, Asia and eastern Europe accepting the free market system, so more places are open for business.
• The Internet, mobile phones and other global media making national borders matter less to customers.
• The need to manage the world's resources and environment for future generations, which no single country can do alone.

The result: every American company is international, whether it wants to be or not, because what happens abroad affects how it does at home. Being international "is no longer a luxury but a necessity for economic survival."

Competition now comes from everywhere

Many familiar "American" brands are foreign owned. 7-Eleven and Firestone belong to Japanese companies. Budweiser is Belgian. Ben & Jerry's and Smith & Wesson are British. Purina and Gerber are Swiss. Smithfield Foods and the Waldorf Astoria are Chinese. Foreign direct investmentWhen a company from one country builds or buys a business in another country, rather than just selling to it.Foreign firms own more than $4.6 trillion of business in the United States. This is why the book says every American company is now international whether it likes it or not., meaning foreign companies owning businesses in the United States, is worth more than $4.6 trillion, mostly from Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, Canada and France.

The good news runs the other way too. A study of 1,250 U.S. manufacturers found that companies operating in many countries grew twice as fast as purely domestic ones and made higher profits. Intel earns 78 percent of its revenue outside the United States; Exxon and Apple earn about 60 percent abroad.

What international marketing is

The book's definition: international marketing is the performance of business activities, including pricing, promotion, product, and distribution decisions, across national borders.

Read that definition next to the definition of ordinary marketing and you will notice only one difference: the words across national borders, or as the book also puts it, in more than one country. The ideas of marketing are the same everywhere. Whether you are selling "in Dimebox, Texas, or Dar es Salaam, Tanzania," the job is the same job.

So where does the difficulty come from? Not from the ideas. It comes from the environment within which marketing plans must be implemented: the surroundings. Abroad you meet unfamiliar problems and much more uncertainty, and you need a wider range of strategies to cope. The marketer's task is to shape the controllable elementsThe parts of marketing the company itself decides: product, price, promotion, distribution channels and research.Called controllable because the firm can change them. The book counts five, and students often forget research is one of them., the things the company decides (product, price, promotion, distribution, research), to fit the uncontrollable elementsOutside forces the company cannot change and has to work around: competitors, politics, laws, how customers behave, the level of technology.At home there is one set of these. Abroad there is one set for every country you enter. That is the extra difficulty of international marketing., the things the company cannot change (competitors, politics, laws, customer behavior, level of technology), so that the company reaches its goals.

The international marketing task

At home a marketer deals with one set of uncontrollable forces. Abroad there are at least two levels of uncontrollable uncertainty: the forces at home, plus a separate set of forces for every foreign country entered. Exhibit 1.3 draws this as rings around a centre.

Two of the seven foreign forces get extra attention in the book.

Level of technology. You cannot assume that people everywhere understand a machine the way your home customers do. The book's example is preventive maintenance, meaning servicing a machine before it breaks. In some countries this idea is unfamiliar, so the company has to train local staff or provide the service itself.

Political and legal forces. A foreign company always has alien statusBeing the foreign company: owned by outsiders and run by people who do not belong to the local culture.Because of this a foreign firm is easy to blame and easy to treat unfairly, even when it follows every law. Governments and the public may see it as an exploiter.: it is owned by foreigners and run by people who do not belong to the local cultureEverything a group of people learns and shares: their values, rituals, symbols, beliefs and ways of thinking, passed down from one generation to the next.Chapter 3 gives a shorter version: a society's accepted way of responding to events. Chapter 4 uses the five-part version, and each of the five parts gets its own section.. That makes it an easy target. It can be painted as an exploiter and treated unfairly even when it follows the law. India told Coca-Cola to reveal its secret formula or leave the country; it left. In China a contract is only binding if it is signed by an official "legal representative" of a registered "legal person," and the Chinese government once blocked a new Coca-Cola plant for being "too successful." The more countries a company works in, the more of these forces it juggles, and a solution that works in country A often does not work in country B.

Environmental adaptation

Taken together, all these uncontrollable forces are the culture of a country. The hard part is not knowing they exist. The hard part is noticing how they affect your own thinking.

At home we respond to our culture automatically, because we learned it while growing up. The book calls this socializationLearning your own culture while growing up, from family, school, religion and the other institutions around you.Compare with acculturation, which is adjusting to a new culture later in life. Together they are how culture gets into a person.. Abroad, the marketer has to be aware of the frame of referenceThe set of assumptions you use, usually without noticing, to judge what is normal or right.Your frame of reference comes from growing up in your own culture. Abroad you must be aware you are using it, or you will misread ordinary local behavior as rude or strange. being used, meaning the set of assumptions that decide what feels normal. Those assumptions come from being raised in the home culture, a process the book calls acculturationAdjusting to a new culture, the way immigrants do when they move to a new country.Do not mix it up with socialization, which is learning your own culture while growing up. Chapter 1 also uses the word for the marketer's own conditioning at home. here. Culture is like an iceberg: nine-tenths of it is below the surface and we are not aware of it.

Two examples show the trap. An American manager, who values time, is kept waiting in a Latin American office and reads the wait as an insult; locally it is normal. A hand gesture, thumb and forefinger making a circle, means "fine" in the United States, "zero" in France, "money" in Japan and a sexual insult in Sardinia and Greece.

The self-reference criterion and ethnocentrism

The key to success abroad is adaptationConsciously expecting the outside forces at home and abroad to affect your marketing plan, and adjusting the plan to reduce their effect.The book calls this the key to success abroad. The two things that block it are the self-reference criterion and ethnocentrism.: consciously expecting the uncontrollable forces at home and abroad to affect your marketing plan, and adjusting the plan to reduce their effect. Two habits of mind get in the way.

The book's example of the SRC is personal space. Americans stand at a distance that feels right to them without thinking about it. Someone from a culture where people stand closer moves in; the American steps back; each one decides the other is rude. Both are victims of their SRC. The SRC can make you miss a difference altogether, make you dismiss a difference as unimportant, or make you react in a way that offends. Refusing food or drink is polite in the United States. In Asia or the Middle East it is an insult.

Failures caused by the SRC: Starbucks opened a shop inside Beijing's Forbidden City and took six years to realize the mistake. Zara sold a striped blouse with a yellow six-pointed star that looked like the badge Jews were forced to wear under the Nazis. Successes from setting the SRC aside: McVitie's sold its biscuits in Japan individually wrapped in gift boxes at three times the price, because in Japan biscuits are gifts. Unilever changed its detergent for Brazil: a simpler formula, plastic packaging instead of paper because clothes are washed in rivers, and small cheap packs. McDonald's created the Maharaja Mac with two mutton patties for India, where beef is not eaten. Vicks became Wicks in Germany because the original spelling sounds like a crude German word.

Cross-cultural analysis: four steps to remove the SRC

The book's own example: an American sales manager in Tokyo cancelled the daily early-morning sales meeting because his company did not hold such meetings at home. Sales fell sharply. Japanese salespeople are motivated mainly by pressure from their peers, and the meeting was where that pressure worked. When the meetings came back, so did the sales. One more warning from this section: a similarity you fail to notice does no harm, but "the one difference that goes undetected can create a marketing failure."

Developing a global awareness

The book says a globally aware person has two things. First, toleranceUnderstanding that other people behave differently, and accepting and working with them anyway.You do not have to adopt their ways. You do have to let them be different and equal. The book's example: being less punctual does not mean being less productive. of and a willingness to learn about cultural differences. Second, knowledge of cultures, of history, of the potential of world markets, and of global economic, social and political trends. Together these make up global awarenessBeing tolerant of and willing to learn about cultural differences, and knowing about other cultures, history, market potential and world trends.Two parts: an attitude and a body of knowledge. The book says the best way to build it into a company is a mix of nationalities among its top managers.. Other writers call much the same thing cultural intelligenceAlso called CQ. The ability to work well with people from other cultures.The book treats it as almost the same thing as global awareness., or CQ.

• Tolerance means understanding that people differ and accepting and working with them anyway. You do not have to adopt their ways, "but you must allow others to be different and equal." A culture that is less punctual is not less productive, only different.
• Knowledge of cultures and history explains behavior that would otherwise look irrational. Latin American suspicion of foreign investment, or China's reluctance to open fully, both make sense once you know the history (Chapter 3 tells it).
• Knowledge of market potential and trends lets a marketer spot an opportunity long before competitors notice it.

How does a company build global awareness into itself? Three ways. Choose managers who have already shown it. Build personal relationships abroad, because market entry is often made easier by existing social ties. And, "perhaps the most effective approach," have senior managers and board members from many different countries. The book notes that American managers value this last approach less than managers elsewhere do.

Stages of international marketing involvement

Once a company decides to go abroad, it must decide how deeply. Research finds three things push companies to go international faster: having high-technology or strong marketing skills; having a small home market but a large factory; and having managers with good personal networks abroad.

The book describes five stages of involvement. Two warnings before the list. The stages are not a ladder: a company can start at any stage and can be in more than one at the same time. And high-technology firms with short product lives often skip straight to treating the whole world, home included, as one market from day one.

The first two stages are reactive: the company is responding to orders, not planning to expand. Stages three, four and five match the three strategic orientations that come next.

The three strategic orientations

Researchers agree that companies working abroad take one of three basic approaches to strategy. The book's own summary is the cleanest exam answer:

Having a global orientation does not mean doing exactly the same thing everywhere. Procter & Gamble runs a global strategy for disposable diapers but a multidomesticA way of operating abroad where each country is treated as its own separate market, with its own product, promotion and plan.Also called international marketing in the three orientations. The opposite of global marketing, where the world is one market. strategy for detergents in Asia. The choice depends on the product and the market.

The book's own approach is what it calls an environmental/cultural approach to international strategic marketing. It does not re-teach marketing principles. It shows how the cultural environment changes the job of applying them. One reason it thinks this matters for American students: on the KOF Globalization IndexA ranking of how connected each country is to the rest of the world economically, socially and politically.The United States ranks only 24th. It is strong on political links but weak on economic ones and on international tourism, which the book says shows how little contact Americans have with other cultures., which measures how connected countries are to the rest of the world, the United States ranks only 24th. It is strong on political connections (14th) but weak on economic ones (66th) and on international tourism. Americans, the book says, generally have little contact with other cultures, "the very gap on which this book focuses."

Cases

Each case has three parts: what happened, what the book wants it to show, and how to use it in an answer.

Cateora, Chapter 2

This chapter is about the rules of the game. How did world trade get to where it is? How does a country keep score (the balance of paymentsA country's record of all the money that came in from the rest of the world and all the money that went out, usually over one year.It is kept with double-entry bookkeeping, so the two sides always add up. That is why it always balances even when trade does not. The book's phrase: it is a record of condition, not a cause of it.)? Why do governments block imports, what tools do they use, and which international bodies exist to stop them?

The twentieth to the twenty-first century

The first half of the twentieth century was a disaster for trade: a worldwide depression sandwiched between two world wars. The second half had no world war, but the world split into a communist half and a capitalist half, which broke up the old trading patterns.

After World War II the United States set out to spread capitalism as a way of holding back communism. The Marshall PlanThe American program after World War II that paid to rebuild Europe.It was partly meant to stop communism spreading. The book's point is that it paid the United States back: every dollar sent abroad came back many times over as Europeans bought American goods. paid to rebuild Europe. Other aid rebuilt Japan. Money flowed through the Agency for International Development. This was not charity alone. For every dollar the United States invested abroad, hundreds of dollars came back as other countries bought American farm products, manufactured goods and services. That demand soaked up factory capacity that had grown far bigger than America needed for itself during the war.

The cautionary tale of the century is the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930A U.S. law that raised import taxes on more than 20,000 goods to over 60 percent on average.Sixty other countries hit back with their own high tariffs, world trade stopped, and a recession became the Great Depression. This is the book's main warning against protectionism and the reason GATT was created.. It raised the average American import tax on more than 20,000 goods to over 60 percent. Sixty other countries answered with tariffA tax charged by a government on goods coming into the country.Used to raise money, to discourage imports, or both. In the United States tariffs come in three types: a percentage of value, a fixed amount per unit, or both together. walls of their own. Trade stopped, economies stalled, and a recession became the Great Depression. Determined never to repeat this, world leaders created GATTThe agreement signed after World War II by the United States and 22 other countries to lower tariffs and settle trade disputes by talking.It was an agreement, not an organization, and it had no power to enforce anything. After eight rounds of talks it became part of the WTO in 1995., a forum where countries negotiate lower barriers. When the Uruguay RoundThe GATT talks from 1986 to 1994 that cut tariffs, extended the rules to services, investment and intellectual property, and created the WTO.Its four named results are market access, GATS, TRIMs and TRIPs. Learn all four together. of talks ended, GATT became part of the WTO in 1995, with 117 original members.

World trade and U.S. multinationals

In the 1950s and 1960s American companies flooded into Europe and Latin America. The welcome was mixed. Latin American governments expropriatedTaken over by a government. When a government expropriates a business, it seizes it from its foreign owners.In the 1960s Latin American governments expropriated many American businesses or forced them to sell to locals. Chapter 3 shows leaders are cheered at home for doing it. American businesses, meaning they seized them, or forced the owners to sell to locals. European governments demanded limits on foreign investment. In 1968 the French writer J. J. Servan-Schreiber published The American Challenge, predicting that the world's third industrial power, after the United States and the Soviet Union, would be "American industry in Europe."

It did not happen, because competition came back from everywhere. Japan and Germany rebuilt. The newly industrialized countriesCountries that used to be poor but built up industry quickly, such as Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong.Their rise is one reason American companies did not end up dominating the world as people predicted in the 1960s. (NICs), such as Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, built industries of their own. Even state-owned enterprisesCompanies owned by a government rather than by private shareholders.The book notes that SOEs from countries like Venezuela and Chile now compete abroad too, adding to the competition American firms face. (SOEs), government-owned companies from countries like Venezuela, Chile and Bangladesh, began competing abroad. The American share of world output fell from 39 percent in 1950 to under 25 percent in 2017, although the total pie grew much bigger. Of the world's 100 largest industrial companies, the United States had 67 in 1963 and 35 in 2021. China went from none to 30.

The balance of merchandise tradeThe difference between the value of goods a country sells abroad and the goods it buys from abroad.The United States had a surplus every year from 1888 to 1971, then a deficit that passed $1 trillion in 2021. This is only the goods line; it is part of the bigger balance of payments., the difference between the goods a country sells abroad and the goods it buys, tells the same story. The United States sold more than it bought every year from 1888 to 1971. Then it began buying more than it sold. The gap reached $160 billion in 1987, passed $700 billion in 2007, fell by half in the 2009 crisis, and passed $1 trillion in 2021. Since 2006 China has been America's largest trading partner in goods and its largest deficit: $335 billion in 2021, three times the deficit with Mexico. One caution from the book: these statistics exaggerate. An iPhone "imported from China" contains only $8.46 of Chinese value. Most of its parts come from the United States, Japan, Taiwan and Korea.

Looking ahead, the OECD expects rich economies to grow about 3 percent a year and developing economies about 6 percent, so the developing world's share of output rises from one-sixth to nearly one-third. Trading blocs such as the EU, NAFTA (now USMCA) and APEC are expected to shape future trade. And with Hong Kong and Macao returned to China, all of Asia is run by Asians for the first time in 400 years.

Balance of payments

The balance of payments is a country's record of all the money that came in from the rest of the world and all the money that went out, usually over one year. It is kept using double-entry bookkeepingAn accounting method where every transaction is written down twice, once as money coming in and once as money going out.This is why the balance of payments always balances. If a country buys more than it sells, the difference shows up as money borrowed or investment coming in., the accounting method where every transaction is written down twice, once as money in and once as money out. Because of this it always must be in balance: the two sides always add up.

The fact that it balances tells you nothing about whether the country is doing well or badly. If a country buys more than it sells, the gap simply shows up on the other side as money borrowed or investment coming in. In the book's words, "a balance of payments is a record of condition, not a determinant of condition."

Since 1971 the United States has had a positive current accountThe part of the balance of payments that records trade in goods and services, plus money earned from investments abroad and gifts sent between countries.This is the part businesses care most about because it covers all trade. In 2020 the U.S. current account was minus $669 billion. in only a few years. The reasons are heavy buying of oil, cars and consumer goods from abroad. A deficit can be reduced in two ways: bring in more money (sell more abroad, attract more tourists) or send less out. If the deficit lasts, something has to give. A country cannot keep spending more than it earns forever. Once its savings are used up it must lower its standard of living, and if its people will not do that voluntarily, the value of its currency falls. A weaker dollar makes American goods cheaper for foreigners and foreign goods dearer for Americans, which helps the deficit. But it also makes dollar investments less attractive and the dollar less useful as the world's currency.

Protectionism

ProtectionismWhen a government limits imports to shield its own industries from foreign competition, using tariffs, quotas and other barriers.It is popular with voters when jobs are being lost, but the book shows it costs consumers far more than it saves: about $170,000 for every job protected in the United States. means a government limiting imports to shield its own industries from foreign competition. Business executives live, as the book puts it, in "a world of tariffs, quotas, and nontariff barriersAny way of blocking imports other than a tax: limits on quantity, bans, currency rules, product standards, and so on.As tariffs fell after World War II, countries switched to these. Standards and antidumping cases are the fastest-growing kinds today. designed to protect a country's markets." Governments use legal barriers (laws), exchange barriers (rules about currency) and psychological barriers (attitudes against foreign goods). Businesses add private market barriers of their own. Sometimes the structure of a market is the barrier: Japan's complicated distribution system keeps foreign products out, yet it cannot legally be called a trade barrier. China has been accused of holding its currency artificially cheap to make its exports cheaper.

Protection logic and illogic

People who want protection give many reasons. The book boils them down to twelve: (1) protecting an infant industryA new industry in a country that is too young and small to compete yet against established foreign firms.Protecting it for a while so it can grow is one of only three arguments for protectionism that economists accept. The problem is that the protection rarely gets removed later., meaning a new industry too small to compete yet; (2) protecting the home market; (3) keeping money at home; (4) encouraging saving and investment; (5) keeping wages and living standards up; (6) conserving natural resources; (7) helping a low-wage country build industry; (8) keeping people employed; (9) national defense; (10) making businesses bigger; (11) hitting back at other countries and bargaining with them; and (12), in today's climate of strongman rule, the corrupt aims of dictators.

Who pays for protection? Consumers, and they do not know it. A study of 21 protected American industries found consumers pay about $70 billion a year extra in higher prices. The cost of saving one job came to about $170,000, more than that worker earns in wages and benefits. The Trump tariffs cost the average household an extra $250 in 2019. Protection is popular when unemployment is high, but it "rarely leads to renewed growth in a declining industry."

The evidence on the other side, in the book's Exhibit 2.6: from 1990 to 2020, what consumers could buy with their money grew more than 40 percent in the United States and Canada, 19 percent in Mexico, and over 1,000 percent in China. The two big American steps toward free trade were NAFTA in 1994 and giving China permanent normal trade status (PNTR) in 2000, which was followed by China joining the WTO in 2001. The authors find no evidence that NAFTA cost American jobs. The widening gap between rich and poor Americans, they argue, came from decisions made inside the country about taxes, wealth and labor relations, not from trade.

Trade barriers

Trade barriers are put up against imports and against foreign companies. Local industries push for them. Whether or not they make economic sense, they exist, and the marketer has to deal with them. The U.S. Trade Representative sorts them into these categories (the book's Exhibit 2.7):

Tariffs

A tariff is a tax that a government charges on goods entering the country. It is used to raise money, to discourage imports, or both. In the United States tariffs, also called customs duties, come in three types:

What tariffs do, in the book's three-part list. They increase inflation, privileges for special interests, government control of the economy, and the number of tariffs, because one country's tariff invites another's in return (reciprocityDoing to another country what it does to you. If it raises tariffs on your goods, you raise tariffs on its goods.This is how one tariff leads to another and how trade wars start. The pasta war is the book's small example; Smoot-Hawley is the big one.). They weaken the balance of payments, normal supply and demand, and relations between countries, because they can start trade wars. They restrict where manufacturers can buy their supplies, what consumers can choose, and competition. On top of that they are arbitrary, they discriminate, and they need constant administration.

The "pasta war" shows reciprocity in miniature. The United States raised tariffs 40 percent on European spaghetti because Europe was subsidizing its pasta exports. Europe hit back with tariffs on American walnuts and lemons, then on fertilizer, paper and beef tallow. The fight only ended when Europe dropped the subsidies.

Nontariff barriers

Nontariff barriers are all the ways of blocking imports that are not a tax. As tariffs came down after World War II, governments switched to these.

Barriers in history

Every kind of barrier above has already been tried on a large scale. These are the book's own historical examples, useful whenever a question asks why protectionism persists or what it costs.

Easing trade restrictions: the Omnibus Act, GATT, WTO, IMF and World Bank

The Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988

This American law was written when Japan was seen as the number one "trade problem." (China has since taken that place.) It deals with the trade deficit, with protectionism, and with how fairly other countries trade. Its starting point is realistic: "we must deal with our trading partners based on how they actually operate, not on how we want them to behave." It covers three areas:

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade

Before World War II trade treaties were bilateralBetween two countries only.Before GATT, trade treaties were bilateral and tended to raise barriers. After the Doha Round failed, countries went back to bilateral free trade deals; the United States has about 20., between two countries at a time, and they tended to raise barriers rather than lower them. Shortly after the war the United States and 22 other countries signed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the first effective worldwide tariff agreement. It set up a process for negotiating lower tariffs and an agency to keep watch over world trade. Disputes went first to talks between the two countries, then to GATT panels, which could advise but had no power to enforce. GATT had three basic principles: (1) trade conducted on a nondiscriminatory basis, meaning you treat all members alike; (2) protection through customs tariffs, not through quotas, so that whatever protection exists is visible and measurable; and (3) consultation as the primary method to solve problems.

There were eight rounds of GATT talks. The Tokyo RoundThe round of GATT talks in 1974 that was the first to deal with nontariff barriers.It covered subsidies, antidumping, government purchasing, product standards, customs valuation and import licensing. (1974) was the first to deal with nontariff barriers: subsidies, antidumping rules, government purchasing, product standards, customs valuation and import licensing. The Uruguay Round (1986 to 1994), which began in Punta del Este, set out to cut tariffs by a third and ended up doing far more:

World Trade Organization

The World Trade Organization (WTO) was created at Marrakech in April 1994. The important contrast: GATT was an agreement; the WTO is an institution, an organization with members and staff. It has 164 members, each with an equal vote in a ministerial conference that meets at least every two years and elects a director general. It sets trade rules, hears disputes through panels of experts, and issues binding decisions. If the losing country does not change its behavior, the winner is allowed to hit back with sanctionsPenalties one country puts on another, such as refusing to trade with it.The WTO lets the winner of a dispute impose sanctions if the loser does not change its behavior.. The WTO has no police of its own; it relies on international pressure. Members must accept all of its agreements, not just the ones they like. When the United States debated joining, opponents worried about losing sovereigntyA country's right to govern itself without outside control.Loss of sovereignty was the main objection when the United States debated joining the WTO. It is also why Mexico resents the United States in Chapter 3., the right to make its own rules, and about having no veto. China joined in 2001 and Russia in 2012. The Doha RoundThe round of WTO trade talks that began in 2001 and was abandoned in 2016 without agreement.Its failure is why many countries turned to one-to-one free trade agreements instead. of talks, begun in 2001, was abandoned in 2016. President Trump was the WTO's loudest critic, even while Canada was filing WTO complaints against American tariffs.

Getting around the rules. To join the WTO, China cut tariffs on 5,000 product lines and dropped quotas and licenses. American companies then noticed a surge in technical standards and inspection requirements instead: safety inspections on jigsaw puzzles, and certification requiring paid on-site visits by Chinese officials for foreign goods but not for Chinese ones. Frustrated with the failed Doha Round, countries turned to bilateral free trade agreements, one-to-one deals. The United States has about 20, including Peru, Colombia, Panama and South Korea.

The International Monetary Fund and World Bank Group

Two bodies were created after the war to help countries become and stay economically healthy. Before the war, two problems had crippled trade: countries did not have enough foreign currency reserves, and currencies were unstable.

Protests against these institutions. Starting with the WTO meeting in Seattle in November 1999, protesters have targeted the side effects of globalization: damage to the environment, exploitation of workers, lost jobs, dying cultures, higher oil prices and lost sovereignty. Some protests have changed things. Student campaigns against sweatshops, and a lawsuit over working conditions on the island of Saipan, led 17 clothing importers including Calvin Klein and The Gap to settle and promise better conditions.

Cases

Cateora, Chapter 3

The idea of this chapter: to understand why people in a country behave as they do, you need to know two things that most marketers ignore, its history and its geography. History explains attitudes. Geography explains what products work, where people live, and how goods move.

Historical perspective in global business

The chapter defines culture as a society's accepted basis for responding to external and internal events: the shared way a group of people reacts to what happens to it. To read behavior in a country, a marketer needs its history and geography.

History gives a nation its sense of "mission": how it sees its neighbors, its place in the world, and itself. It shapes attitudes toward government and business, toward the relationship between bosses and workers, and toward foreign companies. It also affects practical business decisions: where to invest, how to enter a market, even whom to hire. A former American ambassador to Japan, James Day Hodgson, put the rule simply: anyone doing business in another country should know at least the encyclopedia version of that country's past, out of politeness if nothing else.

China: why the leadership is wary of foreign influence

The book says American history "really begins with China." The Boston Tea Party was a protest not only against a British tax but against Britain's ban on American traders dealing directly with the Chinese port of Canton. Three episodes from Chinese history explain attitudes that still shape business there today:

Japan: loyalty, consensus and Confucian philosophy

Trade with Japan was a hot political topic in the United States in the 1850s and again in the 1980s. The book says you cannot understand how Japan behaves today without knowing the shocks it has been through: seven centuries of rule by military lords (the shogun system), a long period of isolation from the world, the arrival of American warships under Commodore Perry in 1853, the threat of being colonized by Western powers, the rise of new social classes, Western influence, the humiliation of defeat in World War II, and then re-entry into the world community.

Why are Japanese workers so loyal to their companies? Why is it so hard for outsiders to break into Japanese distribution networks? Why are decisions made by consensusA decision everyone in the group agrees to, rather than one imposed by a leader or a vote.Japanese firms decide by consensus. The book traces this to a history of uniting against outside threats., meaning everyone in the group agrees, rather than by one boss? The book's answer is Confucian philosophyAn ancient Chinese system of thought, taught in Japan for centuries, that puts loyalty above almost everything: to friends, family and above all to one's lord and country.The book uses it to explain why Japanese workers are loyal to their companies, why decisions are made by group agreement, and why outsiders find Japanese distribution networks so hard to enter., taught throughout Japan's history. It teaches loyalty "of friend to friend, of wife to husband, of child to parent, of brother to brother, but, above all, of subject to lord," that is, to one's country. Its basic idea is cooperation for the good of the group. Japanese people reach consensus by agreeing to unite against any outside pressure that threatens the group. Loyalty, duty, discipline and respect for training and craftsmanship were stressed for centuries to keep order. This history is the starting point for understanding Japanese business behavior.

The book's timeline: the history that made trade

Chapter 3 ends with a timeline running from the year 1000 to today. Below are the entries that matter for trade, grouped into eras so the pattern is easy to see. The pattern: markets close, the theory of trade is worked out, markets are forced open, the whole system collapses, and the rules are rebuilt.

History is subjective

History matters, but history according to whom? Every historical event is seen through the viewer's own biases and self-reference criterion, so two historians from different cultures record the same event differently. Even maps show this: maps sold in the United States put the United States in the centre; maps sold in Britain put Britain there.

The book's worked example is Mexico's love-hate relationship with the United States. Why did Mexico for so long require Mexicans to own a majority of any foreign investment? Why did the dictator Porfirio Díaz say, "Poor Mexico, so far from God, so near the United States"? Because Mexicans see the United States as a threat to their political, economic and cultural independence. Most Americans are baffled by this. President Kennedy told Mexicans, "Geography has made us neighbors, tradition has made us friends." Mexicans thought it would be more accurate to say, "Geography has made us closer, tradition has made us far apart." The same events, told from the two sides:

The section closes with three Mexican voices. "The United States robbed us, but we are portrayed in American textbooks as bandits." "The world is dividing into commercial blocks, and we are handcuffed to each other for better or worse." "We always have been, and we continue to be, a colony of the United States." A final example of American influence: in 2006 President Fox's government passed a law decriminalizing drugs for personal use, then withdrew it after talks with the Bush administration. President Calderon signed an almost identical law in 2009.

Geography and global markets

Geography is "the study of Earth's surface, climate, continents, countries, peoples, industries, and resources." It is an uncontrollable force that most marketers pay too little attention to. Knowing geography is not memorizing capital cities. It is understanding how a country's culture and economy were shaped by the land it had to live on.

Climate and topography

TopographyThe physical shape of the land: mountains, rivers, plains, coastlines.Mountains like the Andes block trade routes. Once a country becomes rich enough it builds tunnels and canals to get past them. means the shape of the land: mountains, rivers, plains, coasts. Together with climate it changes what products work and how they must be sold.

• Products must be changed for the climate. Altitude, humidity and extreme temperatures affect how things work. American construction equipment needs heavy modification for the Sahara. A shipment of glasses from Taiwan packed in hay arrived in the Middle East in pieces, because the hay dried out and shrank in the desert air.
• One country can have several climates. Ghana runs from desert heat to rainforest humidity. Bosch-Siemens washing machines need a 1,600 rpm spin cycle for sunless Germany and Scandinavia, where clothes must come out nearly dry, but only 500 rpm for sunny Italy and Spain.
• Seasons flip across the equator. JCPenney's expansion into Chile failed partly because when it was buying winter clothes for North America, Chile needed summer clothes. It sold its one store.
• Mountains block trade until a country is rich enough to tunnel through them. The Andes run 4,500 miles at 13,000 feet, so there are no trade routes from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast of South America. Europe once used its mountains and seas as protection: the Channel Tunnel was resisted for decades. Now there are 21-mile and 36-mile tunnels under the Alps.

Geography, nature and economic growth

Poor countries suffer far more from natural disasters than rich ones. Compare Haiti's slow recovery from its 2010 and 2021 earthquakes with Japan's fast recovery after 2011. Big engineering projects can help or harm: China's Three Gorges Dam displaced 1.3 million people and traps the silt that used to fertilize farmland downstream; India's Narmada dam project displaced tens of thousands. The book's rule: huge projects "must be measured against their social and environmental costs."

Social responsibility and environmental management

Protecting the environment "is not an optional extra." It is a global problem that no country can solve alone. China is now the world's biggest polluter: its greenhouse-gas emissionsGases such as carbon dioxide that are released by burning fuel and trap heat in the atmosphere.The United States has one of the highest rates per person. China's total is more than double the U.S. total., the gases from burning fuel that heat the planet, are more than double America's, and 21 percent of its rivers and lakes are toxic. The world produces more than 300 million tons of hazardous waste a year. The Basel ConventionAn international treaty that controls the shipping of hazardous waste from rich countries to poorer ones.It started by requiring approval and was later tightened to a total ban on exporting hazardous waste from developed countries., the treaty on shipping such waste, started by requiring approval and was later tightened to a total ban on exporting hazardous waste from developed countries. Per person, the United States has one of the highest emission rates in the world; it left the Paris Climate Agreement in 2017 and rejoined in February 2021. The Paris goal of cutting global emissions 45 percent by 2030 "seems unattainable."

Sustainable developmentEconomic growth that uses resources wisely, shares the benefits fairly and does not damage people or the environment.The book insists it is not about the environment alone or the economy alone, but about keeping all three, environment, economy and society, in balance. is the answer the book offers: economic growth combined with "wise resource management, equitable distribution of benefits and reduction of negative effects on people and the environment." The key point: it is not about the environment alone, or the economy alone, or society alone, but about keeping all three in a lasting balance.

Resources

Where minerals and energy are found is a geographic accident, and no country's supply matches its needs. Oil and gas provide more than 60 percent of the world's energy. The United States produced all its own oil until 1942 and imported 66 percent of it by 2011; with fracking, dependence should fall to 50 to 60 percent by mid-century. Countries differ hugely in how efficiently they use energy: Japan needs less than 5 ounces of oil to produce $1 of output, China about 80, mostly because of outdated technology. New resource contests are starting: lithium in Bolivia, nickel in New Caledonia. Renewable energy grew tenfold in three years.

Dynamics of global population trends

The world has passed 8 billion people and is expected to reach about 9.8 billion by 2050, although one UN scenario has population peaking near 8 billion and falling after 2040. Every scenario agrees on one thing: by 2050, 85 percent of people will live in less-developed regions. The International Labour Organization says 1.2 billion jobs must be created by 2025, mostly in cities. Four trends matter for marketers:

World trade routes and communication links

Trade routes tie the world together. They overcome distance, natural barriers, missing resources and differences between peoples. Routes laid down by the 1500s still matter today. Spanish ships carried silver from Mexico to Manila and came back with Chinese silk, which was unloaded in Mexico and carried overland to the Atlantic. Today the Panama Canal, now being widened, does that crossing, and Latin America's ties to Europe and Asia date from that era. Most trade still moves between Europe, North America and Asia, but the fastest-growing routes are between developing countries. China is building an overland "Silk Road" to Europe. Melting Arctic ice is opening a Northwest Passage that may one day compete with the canal.

Communication is the foundation of all trade: you need to know where goods are and where they are wanted, and to send messages instantly across distance. Each new technology, the telegraph, the telephone, television, satellites, mobile phones, computers, the Internet and now blockchain, created new ways of doing business, and companies that did not adapt disappeared. The book expects the Internet and mobile revolutions to be no different, with the biggest changes still to come. Its small example: the Corinth Canal in Greece, opened in 1893, replaced the old practice of dragging ships across a 6-kilometre strip of land.

Cases

Cateora, Chapter 4

This chapter takes culture apart. What is it made of? Where does it come from? How do you measure it? And can a marketer change it, and should they?

Culture's pervasive impact

Culture is a people's design for living. The book gives three ways of defining it, and each is useful in a different kind of answer:

Culture touches every part of marketing: pricing, research, promotion, distribution channels, the product itself, its packaging and its styling. And it works in both directions. A marketer adapts to culture, but a marketer's work also becomes part of the culture. The book's formula: markets are the result of the three-way interaction of a marketer's efforts, economic conditions, and all other elements of the culture. Whenever a marketer introduces something new, the marketer becomes an agent of change, because "the use of something new is the beginning of cultural change."

Evidence that culture shapes what people buy

• Birthrates. Singapore's birth rate jumped in 1976, 1988 and 2000. Those were Years of the Dragon, considered lucky. Sellers of diapers, then toys, then school places felt the wave in successive years. Japan's birth rate fell 20 percent in 1966, the Year of the Fire Horse, because women born in that year are believed to have unhappy lives and possibly to murder their husbands. It comes round every 60 years, so the next one is 2026.
• What people consume (Exhibit 4.2). The Dutch spend the most on cut flowers. Germans, Britons and Japanese eat the most chocolate. Spaniards and Japanese eat the most fish. Italians eat the most pasta, which Marco Polo brought from China in 1270. The French and Italians drink the most wine. Spain halved its cigarette consumption in six years after banning smoking in public in 2011, "a huge cultural shift that the world seldom sees."
• What follows from it (Exhibit 4.3). Countries that eat fish rather than red meat have less heart disease. Japan has the world's highest death rate from stomach cancer, blamed on salty foods like soy sauce and on a bacterium that spread in the hard years after the war, and therefore Japan has the world's most advanced stomach cancer treatment. Culture shapes not just what a country buys but what it produces.

The Dutch and flowers: the whole chapter in one story

The book tells one story that touches every part of the chapter. Geography: the Netherlands is a land of rivers and bays, so it became a trading nation, and it rains or snows 200 days a year, so it is a grey place. In 1561 Dutch ships brought tulips from the Ottoman Empire as "spice for the eyes." History: tulip mania followed. A single black tulip bulb sold for the equivalent of a million dollars today. The Dutch invented the futures market to trade bulbs, and then, when the government stepped in in 1637, suffered history's first great market crash. A black tulip costs a dollar today. Technology and economics: the botanist Carolus Clusius learned to control tulip colours and the trade went international. Social institutionsThe organizations that shape how people live together: family, religion, school, the media, government and corporations.Six of them. The ones that shape values most are the ones that reach children early: family, religion, school and now the media. Government matters least because values are set before adulthood.: every Easter the Pope thanks the Dutch for flowers in their own language, the government sponsors a huge flower show every ten years (next in 2032), and the Aalsmeer flower auction, the size of 150 football fields and handling 20 million stems a day, sets world flower prices using a falling-price "Dutch auction"; the Netherlands holds 60 percent of world flower exports. Cultural values: the Dutch value flowers highly, so they buy more than anyone. AestheticsA culture's sense of what is beautiful, shown in its art, music, dance, dress and design.Marketers get this wrong constantly: the wrong tartan, the wrong number of teacups, a shoe pattern that looks like a sacred word. Customers use aesthetics to say who they are. as symbols: Rembrandt and Van Gogh painted in the dark colours of their grey surroundings; when Van Gogh moved to the sunny south of France his colours exploded and he painted flowers.

Definitions and origins of culture

The best marketers understand not just how cultures differ but why: where the differences come from. That deeper knowledge lets them spot differences in a new market and predict changes in one they already know. The book's Exhibit 4.4 shows the chain of cause and effect. People adapt to their surroundings through innovation. Individuals learn their culture from social institutions in three ways: socialization (growing up inside a culture), acculturation (adjusting to a new culture, as immigrants do), and role modelingLearning by copying the people around you, especially peers.One of the three ways the book says culture is passed on, alongside socialization and acculturation. (copying the people around you). Culture itself has five origins:

The six social institutions

• Family. Women are marrying later; more than a quarter of Japanese women aged 35 to 39 have never married, so Japan pays $900 a month per child and one region runs a government dating cafe. NepotismGiving jobs or favors to relatives.Seen as a problem in American companies but as a normal way to organize a business in China and Mexico. Same behavior, opposite judgment., giving jobs to relatives, is a problem in American firms but the normal way to organize a business in China and Mexico. Boys outnumber girls 113 to 100 among children in India and 116 to 100 in China, leaving 30 million Chinese men without wives. Individualism starts early: an American baby sleeps alone in her own crib from the first night. In collectivistDescribing a culture where people see themselves first as members of a group, and the group's needs come before the individual's.The opposite of individualist. In collectivist cultures a promotion aimed at the family or friendship group works better than one aimed at a single person. cultures, where the group comes first, a promotion aimed at the family or the friendship group works better than one aimed at one person. Canadian travel ads show a woman alone to English speakers and a couple or group to French speakers.
• Religion. The first institution a child meets outside the home. Protestants confess directly to God in prayer; Catholics confess through a priest. Some scholars think this is why Protestant cultures tend to be more egalitarianBelieving that all people are equal and should be treated equally.The book suggests Protestant cultures, where people pray directly to God, tend to be more egalitarian than cultures where a priest stands in between., believing everyone is equal. Ignorance of religion causes offense: South Africa banned an Axe ad showing angels dropping their halos; Chanel had to destroy dresses embroidered with verses from the Quran, copied from a book about the Taj Mahal; Chevrolet's logo was judged to look like a cross. More than a billion people are Muslim.
• School. Literacy, the ability to read and write, is a powerful economic force. The World Bank says no country has succeeded economically with less than half its people able to read. For marketers, a literate market can be reached with words; an illiterate one only with pictures and symbols. School days per year: 180 in the United States, 245 in China, 220 in South Korea, 210 in Japan. The top scorers in the international PISA tests are China, Singapore, Macao and Hong Kong, yet Chinese officials now worry that so much schooling produces narrow minds.
• The media. Time with screens has replaced time with family. Children up to age 8 spent nearly an hour a day on a mobile device in 2021, up from 5 minutes in 2011. Black parents (39 percent) are twice as likely as white parents (19 percent) to see educational value in it.
• Government. Has relatively little influence on values compared with family, religion and school, because values are set before and during the teenage years. Governments try anyway: France pays an $800 bonus for each birth, Japan spent $225 million on day care, several European countries ban headscarves, full veils or minarets, and Ireland tightened its alcohol laws because drinking was costing 2 percent of national output. Some governments own the media and use it for propaganda. Iran is ruled by clerics.
• Corporations. Most new things enter a society through companies, often multinationals. Merchants have been the main carriers of new ideas since the Silk Road. This makes companies change agents, which is the subject of the chapter's last section.

Elements of culture

Culture is made of five elements: values, rituals, symbols, beliefs and thought processes. Products, distribution and promotion all have to be designed with each of the five in mind.

Cultural values: Hofstede's dimensions

Cultural values are what a culture thinks is important. The Dutch researcher Geert Hofstede surveyed more than 90,000 people in 66 countries and found four main ways cultures differ. The Individualism/Collectivism IndexHofstede's measure of whether people put themselves first ('I') or their group first ('we').The United States scores 91, the highest of all. Japan scores 46. High individualism means people are more willing to try new things alone, like trading stocks at a computer. (IDV) measures whether people put themselves first or their group first. The Power Distance IndexHofstede's measure of how much a culture accepts inequality between bosses and workers, or rulers and ruled.High scores mean strong hierarchy and respect for authority: Guatemala 95, Mexico 81. Low scores mean people expect equality: Britain and Germany 35. (PDI) measures how much a culture accepts inequality between bosses and workers. The Uncertainty Avoidance IndexHofstede's measure of how uncomfortable a culture is with uncertainty, risk and the unknown.High scores mean people prefer rules, safety and certainty: Greece 112, Japan 92. Low scores mean people accept risk and change: Britain 35. This is what predicted that Japanese savers would avoid the stock market. (UAI) measures how uncomfortable people are with uncertainty and risk. The Masculinity/Femininity IndexHofstede's measure of how much a culture values assertiveness and achievement (masculine) versus caring and quality of life (feminine).The book mentions it but focuses on the other three dimensions. (MAS) measures how much a culture values assertiveness and achievement over caring and quality of life. Later research added two more: Long-Term Orientation and Indulgence. The book concentrates on the first three, IDV, PDI and UAI. Robert House's GLOBE study produced similar results 25 years later.

The numbers explain the chapter's opening case about online share trading. The United States has the highest individualism score of all (91), against Japan (46) and France (71), so sitting alone at a computer making your own investment decisions feels most natural to Americans. Japan (92) and France (86) score high on uncertainty avoidance, against the United States (46), so Japanese and French savers prefer the safety of a postal savings account to the risk of shares. In general, cultures with high individualism and low uncertainty avoidance adopt new things faster. One twist: when American and Chinese students were shown ads aimed at the self versus ads aimed at others, each group preferred the opposite of what its culture predicted, simply because it was novel. As the book says, "the complexity of human behavior, values, and culture is manifest."

Rituals

Rituals are patterns of behavior that people learn and repeat. Big ones: weddings (in Delhi the groom arrives on a white horse), funerals, graduations, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca (2 million a year), Hindu prayers at Varanasi (60 to 80 million pilgrims). Small ones: dinner in Madrid starts at midnight and lasts three hours; Japanese shop staff bow to you at the door; in Spain the doctor talks to you at her desk, not in an examination room. Rituals coordinate how people interact and "let people know what to expect." Business negotiation is a ritual too.

Symbols: language and aesthetics

Symbols are things that stand for something else. The anthropologist Edward T. Hall said that culture is communication, with its own "languages" of time, space, things, friendships and agreements. We start learning to read these symbols at birth.

Beliefs

Many beliefs come from religion, but many are not religious at all, and what Westerners call superstition can be central to life elsewhere: ghosts, fortune telling, palm reading, blood types, phases of the moon. Chinese prices end in 8, the number that means prosperity; the Beijing Olympics opened on 8 August 2008 at 8:08 pm. Feng shuiThe Chinese practice of arranging buildings and objects so that good energy, called ch'i, can flow and bad energy is kept out.Disney applied it to every ride in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Many Westerners dismiss it, but the book points out the same people avoid the 13th floor. is the Chinese practice of arranging buildings and objects so that ch'i, the energy that sustains life, flows well and the harmful sha ch'i is kept out; buildings avoid facing northwest (the "devil's entrance") or southwest (the "devil's backdoor"). Disney had every ride in Hong Kong and Shanghai checked by feng shui masters. The book's warning: "one person's beliefs are another person's funny story." The Westerner who laughs at the Year of the Fire Horse still avoids the 13th floor.

Thought processes

Thought processes are the ways people reason, and these differ across cultures too. Culture matters more in quick judgments than in long deliberations, and it even affects how people perceive smells. Richard Nisbett's book The Geography of Thought found that Asians look at the whole picture and remember both background and foreground, while Westerners focus on the main object in front and remember little of what was behind it. This difference between focus and big picture predicts differences in values, preferences and expectations, "pertinent to Japanese selling in Jacksonville or Belgians selling in Beijing."

Cultural sensitivity and tolerance

Successful marketing abroad starts with cultural sensitivityBeing aware of the small details of another culture so you can see it fairly, without judging it by your own.Also called cultural empathy. The book's rule: just because a culture is different does not make it wrong., also called cultural empathyAnother name for cultural sensitivity: the ability to see another culture from the inside.The more unfamiliar the situation, the more of it you need.: being aware of the small details of another culture so that you can see it fairly, weigh it and appreciate it, instead of judging it by your own. Remember that for every foreign habit we find funny, annoying or disgusting, someone abroad finds one of ours just as strange. Our daily ritual of showering and deodorizing looks compulsive to many cultures. The book's rule, worth quoting: "Just because a culture is different does not make it wrong." Marketers must understand how their own culture shapes what they assume about another. The more exotic the situation, the more sensitive, tolerant and flexible they must be.

Cultural change

Culture is alive, "a living process," and it changes. Yet it is also conservative and resists change. The book admits this sounds like a contradiction. Cultures that are more open to change tend to belong to more successful economies. Change can come from war (Japan after 1945), from disaster, or, most often, from a society solving problems that changes in its surroundings have created. Culture, in this view, is "the accumulation of a series of the best solutions to problems faced in common." Societies find these solutions by accident, by inventing them, and above all by borrowing them.

Planned and unplanned cultural change

Through most of history, cultural change just happened. Increasingly it is the result of a deliberate effort by an institution people trust: planned changeDeliberately working to change the parts of a culture that resist your product, so people accept it faster.Two steps: first find out which cultural beliefs are in the way, then work to turn those obstacles into reasons to buy. Because you are changing a culture on purpose, the book says you are responsible for the results.. The method that social planners use to introduce new crops or sanitation works for marketers too. First, find out which cultural factors conflict with your innovation and cause resistance. Then work to change those factors, turning obstacles into reasons to accept it. A marketer introducing something new has two choices: wait for the culture to change, or spur the change along. Fidelity Investments set up a tent outside Tokyo's Shinjuku station and handed commuters brochures and demonstrations of share trading in Japanese; even so, the change came too slowly for most foreign firms. The book describes three strategies:

A marketing strategy is judged by the culture in one of three ways: accepted, resisted or rejected. "All too often, marketers are not aware of the scope of their impact on a host culture." If you set out to change a culture on purpose, you have some responsibility for the consequences. The book's discussion questions push on this. One asks for examples of functional (helpful) versus dysfunctional (harmful) innovations. Another asks you to defend the claim that a multinational has no responsibility beyond making a product that is safe and works. A third asks you to name a product whose introduction may cause harm, and to explain how to remove the harm and still make a profit.

Cases

The lists you must be able to write out from memory

Cover the answer, say the list out loud, then open it to check. Everything expands when printed.

Every date the four chapters mention, in order

Every historical event in Chapters 1 to 4, oldest first. Bold entries with a filled dot are the ones the book spends real time on: a named section, a case, or a key term. The plain entries are single lines from the book's own chronology that support a bigger point. The grey line under each event says why the book brings it up; that is the part to remember, the date is only the hook.