Walton: Building a Global Brand Through Internationalization (Teaching Note)

Increasingly, business students the world over work with cases from prominent emerging markets, especially the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries. The Goldman Sachs economists, a few years after coining the BRIC moniker, created the N-11 emerging market economies list. Bangladesh is one of the N-11 economies and cases from the N-11 emerging markets, particularly Bangladesh, are hard to find.
This case of the brand Walton has been developed to illustrate the various dimensions of internationalisation capability, in particular: firm capabilities, marketing and internationalisation strategies that led this Bangladesh-based firm to first achieve incremental growth in international markets, and later set the stage for a more wide-ranging and challenging stage of internationalisation. In particular, the Walton case represents how rudimentary forms of internationalisation, dating back to British colonial rule in South Asia and rooted in the multi-generational history of a business family that traded across boundaries, spawned a mind-set that inspired the third generation entrepreneurs in this family to develop the capability to internationalise their brand. The contemporary internationalisation process unfolded gradually, step-by-step, and now the company seems poised to enter a new phase that is geographically as well as competitively much more challenging than the preceding phases.

CASE OBJECTIVES
At the end of the discussion of this case, students will be able to understand:

•The pattern of internationalisation of a large firm from the N-11 emerging market
•The diversification and brand development (marketing mix) strategies of a newly internationalised firm from an emerging market
•How firm capabilities (i.e. ownership advantages) affect internationalisation and why a firm chooses different locations in the internationalisation process
•Why a firm internalises or externalises functions in internationalisation
•The challenges in internationalisation and realise how important international management capabilities are to managing and establishing a brand in international marketing

POSITION IN COURSE
This case is designed for courses in ‘international marketing' and/or 'international business’ at both the bachelor's and master's level. However, it is also suitable for ‘global branding and strategies’ and ‘marketing’ courses.