Environmental Factors

The impact of trade practices and agreements is that trade agreements encourage countries to participate in international. Trade agreements typically deal with the transformation of goods and services into a commodity that consist of raw materials and manufactured goods. Organizations that are engaged in standards development call for increased certification, accreditation, and rigorous assessment of these standards. Support and dedication effectively allows labor to move freely across national boundaries.

The importance of demographics and physical infrastructure affects what decisions have to be made when investing in a country's infrastructure. Examples are: making decisions about schools, irrigation and other agricultural needs so that populations can be fed, the importance of roads, bridges, and other transportation in facilitating trade and markets for economic growth, energy, and communication; just to name a few. There will always be both urgent needs for the private and public infrastructure because the age and growth of the population determine the priority of those needs.

The influence of cultural differences has a direct impact on market penetration of a product or service. It is thought that greater emphasis should be placed on global marketing plans on prevailing cultural trends in a target country. The importance of social responsibility is a practice used to improve the workplace and benefit society. It is suggested that factors such as communication (language) barriers, political barriers, geographic distance, economic factors, industry barriers, time differences, technology barriers, legal differences and infrastructure barriers as being more likely to have a greater impact on cross-national relationships.

The importance of ethics versus legal obligations when marketing a product globally is that any marketing plan is incomplete without incorporating ethical considerations. Decision areas that likely require an ethical thought are:

Employment Practices and Policies, Consumer Protection, Environmental Protection, Basic human rights and fundamental freedoms, Involvement in political affairs of the country. It is imperative that marketing plans, whether aimed at domestic or global audience, consider ethical issues because "issues like environmental damage, improper treatment of workers, and faulty production of leading to customer's inconvenience, etc.