Global Marketing Strategy of SMEs: Case Study Sample

This is a global marketing strategy sample built around Curiscope, a small UK company that made augmented and virtual reality learning products. It was written for a university marketing module, and it works through country-cluster cultural analysis, the marketing mix of product, people, promotion and price, and six recommendations for taking an SME product into a new country. The company facts are a snapshot of 2016 to 2023.

If you have a similar brief, our MBA assignment help covers marketing strategy, market entry and cross-cultural analysis, and more MBA assignment samples sit alongside this one.

What Is a Global Marketing Strategy?

A global marketing strategy is a plan a business uses to sell its products or services in more than one country, adapting to each market while keeping one brand image. In this sample it means branding, budgets and large campaigns are decided globally, while local outreach, events, partnerships and PR are left to teams in each market.

An Analysis and Evaluation of an SME's Global Marketing Strategy

The report is organised around eight decisions a small firm has to make before it sells abroad: how far to standardise the product, how far to standardise the price, whether the brand name travels, how the promotion is built, where activity is concentrated, how competitive moves are coordinated, which markets to enter and in what order. The sections that follow work through the four mix elements where Curiscope has to make a choice.

Why Must an SME Study Culture Before Entering a Foreign Market?

Because culture decides how a market reads a product. The sample argues that a company should analyse the market, its economy and its people before it commits to a launch, and that no single global culture exists yet. Analysis therefore works through country clusters, grouping nations that share cultural threads.

Globalisation has opened cross-border trade to firms that would once have stayed domestic. Small and medium-sized enterprises now compete for customers in countries their staff have never visited. That access is the opportunity this report examines. The constraint it works under is that an SME cannot absorb the cost of a failed launch the way a large firm can.

Before entering any international market, a company needs to analyse the market, the economy it sits in, and the culture of the people it wants to sell to. Malhotra, Agarwal and Peterson (1996) describe how that research should start: by comparing the behaviour in question across cultural contexts and removing the influence of the self-reference criterion, the researcher's habit of judging another market by the standards of their own. It is unlikely that this generation will see a single world culture in which national cultures have merged, so cultural analysis works through country clusters instead: groups of nations that share enough common ground to be treated together for brand management purposes. Clusters are a simplification, and the sample uses them as one because the alternative, a separate plan for every country, is beyond the budget of a firm this size.

Who Was Curiscope, the SME in This Case Study?

Curiscope was a Brighton company that built augmented and virtual reality learning products for children. Companies House records it as incorporated on 23 May 2016 and dissolved on 17 October 2023. Its two products were the Virtuali-Tee anatomy T-shirt and the Multiverse poster series, both read through a free app on a phone or tablet.

The register entry is the firmest fact available about it. CURISCOPE LIMITED, company number 10193631, was incorporated on 23 May 2016 under SIC code 62012, business and domestic software development, with a registered office at Kemp House, 160 City Road, London, and its status is now "Dissolved", with a dissolution date of 17 October 2023 (Companies House, accessed 2026). The company was wound up before this report was written, so what follows is a worked example of how a firm this size plans a market entry, not a description of a live business.

By 2017 the operation was run from Brighton (Growth Business, 2017), having moved out of London to reach the games developers based there. The founders' stated aim was "something interactive that would get kids learning with each other, as well as with their teachers and parents, rather than something that was more of a formal educational tool that was aligned with the curriculum" (Immersive Tech Network, n.d.). That choice matters for the marketing: the buyer is a parent or a teacher, not a curriculum authority, and the products were built around animations a learner can walk around and interact with, which is the part a textbook cannot do.

The Virtuali-Tee is a T-shirt printed with tracking markers. Held in front of the app, it shows the anatomy of the person wearing it, layer by layer. The company's own case study describes it as a product that "combines a smart T-shirt designed with an augmented reality-based app that work together to teach anatomy", says it was released to the mass market in October 2017 and was "already available in 70-80 countries around the world" through the Science Museum, Selfridges, John Lewis and Amazon, and reports that it "proved to be most popular amongst 8-13 year olds" (Immersive Tech Network, n.d.). The Multiverse poster series worked the same way: viewed through the app, the poster became an animated tour of planets and stars with an audio explanation.

Funding came in two stages. The company crowdfunded "$117,436 from over 1,700 backers" across Kickstarter and Indiegogo (TechRound, n.d.), and the founders' own account of the delivery problem that created is blunt: "We raised $117K, and we had to deliver to around 1,500 people" (Immersive Tech Network, n.d.). In October 2017 it raised $1m, about £771,000, in a round led by LocalGlobe, to launch the Virtuali-Tee worldwide (Growth Business, 2017).

How Does the Marketing Mix Change Across Cultures?

Culture changes what customers need, expect and accept, so a marketing policy that works in one country cluster can fail in another. This part of the sample works through four elements of the mix for Curiscope, product, people, promotion and price, and tests each against the culture of the target market. The sections below keep the present tense of the original brief, which treated the company as trading.

Several forces push a firm of this size outward: regional demand for a product that is not made locally, the spread of the technology it depends on, pressure to spread development costs over more customers, and pressure to compete on quality (Bešić, Đorđević and Bešić, 2017). What travels badly is the assumption that a buyer in the new market wants what the home buyer wants. Different cultures set different needs, and they also set different attitudes and buying behaviour, so a policy that sells well in one cluster can fail in another or cause offence. Moving a product from one culture into another therefore needs research before it needs a campaign, and the campaign that follows has to be one the target society will accept.

How Should an SME Adapt Its Product for Another Culture?

Start with the brand, the quality, the labelling and the presentation, then test each against local norms. The sample gives two examples: Unilever's cream cleaner, which carries a different name in Germany, Canada and Australia from the one it carries in Britain, and Japanese and Korean buyers, who expect the pack to signal the care taken with the product.

The product is the good or service the customer buys, and the decisions attached to it are its specification, its brand, its quality, its labelling and its presentation. Whether a product is adopted in a given culture depends largely on how well it fits the way people there already live and what they already believe (Kotler, 2003).

Both Curiscope products ran on one app across every market the company reached, so the decision in a new market was rarely about what the product does. It was about the garment or the paper the markers are printed on, the language of the audio, and the pack the buyer sees first.

Culture shapes the features and the specification, and the changes a product needs should be identified before launch, not after. Unilever's cream cleaner is the standard illustration. Launched in France in 1965 as Cif, it is still sold as Jif in Australia and New Zealand, as Viss in Germany and as Vim in Canada (Wikipedia, 2026). Britain had Jif until Unilever renamed it Cif from January 2001, because the product was already Cif in more than 80 per cent of its markets and one name is cheaper to run than several (Marketing Week, 2000). The example cuts both ways: a name is adapted where the local market will not take the global one, and standardised where the markets are close enough that a single brand pays. The research and development team therefore has to know the cultural norms of the target cluster and decide, element by element, which parts of the product travel unchanged and which do not. For Curiscope the app and the tracking design travel; the garment the markers are printed on, and the language of the audio, may not.

Packaging carries the same weight. Some cultures judge a product by how it is presented and some do not (Oosthuizen, 2004). Japanese and Korean buyers are the example the sample uses: the pack is expected to show the care taken with the product, and one that is not packed to that standard may not sell at all. Curiscope should therefore take advice from designers who work in the target market before it settles the labelling and the pack.

Why Do Employees Need Cross-Cultural Training?

Because staff carry the strategy into the market. Mariadoss (2016) sets the purpose of cross-cultural training as building four qualities: preparedness, sensitivity, patience and flexibility. The sample runs it in stages, first building awareness of one's own culture and of others, then teaching how companies are managed in each target country.

Cross-cultural training is what makes a team able to work with colleagues, partners and customers whose assumptions differ from their own, and it also protects the firm legally and reputationally when staff from different backgrounds work together, which is the practical case Patrick and Kumar (2012) make for managing diversity deliberately rather than leaving it to good intentions. The difference is concrete. An employee in the United States is more likely to work to an individual objective, while a colleague in Japan is more likely to work to a team one. For the two to negotiate or to run a project together, each needs a working knowledge of how the other's workplace operates.

For Curiscope to sell into global markets, its staff need an accurate picture of the cultures they are selling into, or the marketing will misfire. Mariadoss (2016) defines the purpose of cross-cultural training as cultivating four characteristics in employees: preparedness, sensitivity, patience and flexibility. The methods range from training sessions to field projects, and the topics that matter most are cultural empathy, recognising stereotypes, language and accent, socio-cultural norms and the assumptions people hold about work (Onkvisit and Shaw, 2004). Product decisions follow from this directly. A team that has never sold into a market cannot judge whether a T-shirt is an everyday garment there, what the audio track should sound like, or whether a poster belongs on a classroom wall or inside a workbook, and all three of those are product decisions rather than promotion ones. Building this understanding can be organised in two stages.

Creating cross-cultural awareness

Awareness comes first. Staff need to recognise the elements of their own culture as well as those of the cultures they are working with, because the assumptions that shape their judgement are usually invisible to them until they are named. Comparison is the useful exercise: set two ways of managing a team side by side and ask which parts are practical necessity and which are habit. Done properly, this builds a shared knowledge base about how work is organised in each target market.

The aim is respect rather than ranking. An exercise that leaves staff proud of their own culture and curious about others produces a workable internal culture in a mixed team, which in turn affects teamwork, participation and output. Managers have to go further than their teams here, because they set the standard, and the relationships that carry a firm into a new market are usually theirs to build.

Providing cross-cultural education

The second stage teaches how companies are actually managed in each target country: how decisions are made, how contracts are handled, how staff are paid and promoted. The point of the comparison is practical. Once a team can see several ways of running the same process, it can choose the one that suits the market it is entering.

Curiscope is a young company with a small headcount, so this cannot be a specialist function. The developers need to know the cultural requirements before they design, the marketing team needs to know which promotional practices are accepted in the target market, and the finance team needs to know the country's rules on pricing, tax and payment. Education of this kind also keeps the team aware of what competitors in the target cluster are doing, and of how culture changes the way buyers there judge a product.

How Should an SME Promote Its Product in a New Market?

Match the channel to the way the market lives. Curiscope promoted the Virtuali-Tee through social media aimed at parents and educators, through email, and by placing products in education institutes, and it avoided mainstream advertising. In a country with little internet or social media use, digital marketing would be the wrong first choice.

Promotion is how a company communicates with customers about a product: introducing it, and giving them a reason to prefer it to the alternatives. It covers advertising, direct marketing and one-to-one selling, and most firms use a combination. The cultural qualification has to be tested rather than assumed, and it can cut the other way: Kwok and Uncles (2005) found that Anglo-Australian and Chinese-Australian consumers held measurably different cultural values yet responded to the same sales promotions in much the same way. Cultural distance is a reason to research a promotion before running it, not proof that it will fail. Curiscope's mix reflected its buyers. Educational products such as the Virtuali-Tee were promoted through social media aimed at parents and educators, and the company also placed products in schools and colleges, where a student can use one and then buy their own. That worked because the target customer is a learner or the adult who buys for a learner.

The channel has to match how the audience lives. The product is aimed at young learners, and social media reaches the adults who buy for them. Alongside it, the company uses email to send product descriptions and classroom uses to people who have shown interest. Email works when it reaches an inbox rather than a spam folder, which is a question of list quality rather than volume.

Advertising in the traditional sense, newspapers, television and posters, communicates to many people quickly but cannot be aimed precisely, and it costs more per buyer reached. Given the product and the size of the company, Curiscope has avoided mainstream advertising.

Before promoting the product in a new country, Curiscope should study the demographics and the culture of the target market and build the plan from them. In a country with limited internet and social media use, digital marketing is the wrong first channel. The better question is which channel has already worked for comparable products in that economy. For a firm this size, being able to change the plan when the answer comes back is worth more than committing early (Onkvisit and Shaw, 2004).

How Should an SME Price a Product for a Global Market?

The price has to cover production cost, hold a margin, match the image of the product and answer local competition. Curiscope gives the app away and charges for the T-shirt and the poster. Before setting a price in a new country, the sample says to study local competitors and the social and cultural influences on the buyer.

The sample's working definition of price is the value the customer believes the product has, which means the seller needs to know what buyers in that market expect to pay for something of this kind.

Pricing gets harder across borders because more variables enter: currency, duty, shipping, local purchasing power and local competition. The Curiscope app was free, and the company charged for the physical product that the app reads, which is a razor-and-blade structure rather than a software price. The T-shirt and the poster were priced separately, in pounds for the UK and in dollars for the United States, before tax and shipping.

Competitor pricing belongs in this section, but only with evidence behind it. The price has to be justifiable against whatever the closest substitute costs in the market being entered, and that figure has to be collected market by market.

Competition in a global market is not limited to European firms. Augmented reality has produced small companies in many countries, so before setting a price in a new market Curiscope should look at the regional firms already selling something comparable and at what they charge. The price then has to do four things at once: cover production cost, hold a margin, match the image of the product and stand up against the local alternative.

Regional advice is worth buying at this point. The first step for a manager or negotiator is to examine the target market and the social, cultural and psychological factors that shape what a buyer there will pay. The second is to identify the competitors. A defensible price follows from both.

What Should an SME Do to Market Globally?

The sample makes six recommendations for Curiscope. Run the app, brand and budget centrally and outreach locally. Design for the local culture. Repeat the British retail model with partners abroad. Put one manager in charge of coordination. Brief influencers who reach parents and teachers of 8 to 13 year olds. Get the product into children's hands at local events.

The Virtuali-Tee was already available in 70 to 80 countries through the Science Museum, Selfridges, John Lewis and Amazon, so the recommendations are about turning that reach into a planned entry, one country at a time.

Global and local management

Expanding abroad does not mean dropping local, culture-specific plans. The global plan sets the parameters and the regional plan works inside them. For Curiscope the product already draws the line: one app served every market, so the app and the brand are global, while the garment, the pack and the language of the audio are decided market by market. Curiscope should hire regional experts who understand the structure of the market they are responsible for.

The areas to keep under global management are branding, budgeting, social media strategy, research strategy, large campaigns and global PR, because each of them is cheaper and more consistent run once. Local teams should own local outreach, local PR, local social campaigns, events and partnerships, because each of those depends on knowledge that cannot be held centrally.

Local culture

Cultural norms have to be part of the product decision, not a check at the end. Staff need general cultural awareness so that they design with the target market in mind, and managers and negotiators need specific training and advice from experts in the region being entered. Local consultants can also be brought in for advertising and sales. For Curiscope the test in each market is whether a T-shirt is an everyday garment for children there, whether the audio is in the language they learn in, and whether the pack meets what buyers expect, which for Japanese and Korean buyers means a pack that shows the care taken with the product.

Partnership or collaboration

Getting into an international market is the hard part, and partnerships are one of the more reliable ways through it, because a partner with an established customer base extends the reach of a small brand faster than advertising does. Curiscope has a model to repeat: in Britain the Virtuali-Tee sold through the Science Museum, Selfridges and John Lewis, a museum shop and two department stores. Abroad, the equivalent is the museum, department store or education retailer that already sells to schools or to parents in the target country. Our poster making assignment on Chick-fil-A in India makes the same case for a fast-food chain, recommending a joint venture with a local partner over franchising, licensing and exporting.

Planning

Expanding abroad needs tighter planning than expanding at home, because the mistakes are more expensive and slower to see. Curiscope has met the problem once already: the crowdfund left it with around 1,500 people to deliver to (Immersive Tech Network, n.d.), and the $1m round of October 2017 was raised to launch the product worldwide, which puts the same coordination problem into every market at once. The company needs a global campaign manager responsible for coordinating campaigns across markets, keeping the in-market teams and the centre in step, and preparing for the problems a launch runs into. For a firm of this size that role is the difference between a coordinated entry and several uncoordinated ones.

Local influencers

Curiscope can work with education influencers who publish through blogs and social video. The company's own sales set the brief: the Virtuali-Tee was most popular with 8 to 13 year olds, so the audience to reach is the parents and teachers of that age group, and any of the more than 1,700 crowdfunding backers based in a target country are the first people to ask. For a product that has to be seen working to be understood, a demonstration by someone the audience already trusts is worth more than a description. The cost is low enough for a small firm to test in one market before committing to others.

Events

Sponsoring or organising local events is worth doing where the audience is the right one. Curiscope's home evidence points to which: the product sold through the Science Museum, and placing it in schools let a student use one before buying their own. The equivalent abroad is a museum's family programme, an education fair or a school science week, where a child can wear the T-shirt and see the app work. That builds the local presence a website alone does not.

Should an SME Standardise or Adapt Its Marketing?

Adapt. The sample concludes that adaptation and compromise suit SMEs better than standardisation, because a small firm cannot absorb the cost of a campaign that misreads a market. Curiscope should study the culture and the socio-economic profile of each target country before it introduces a product there.

Standardise or adapt: the choice for an SME

Point of comparison	Standardise	Adapt
What it means	Standardise One product, one name, one campaign run from the centre	Adapt Product, pack, language and promotion changed for each country cluster
Where it is cheaper	Standardise Branding, budgets, research, large campaigns and global PR, run once	Adapt Local outreach, PR, events and partnerships, which depend on knowledge the centre does not hold
Main risk	Standardise A campaign or a garment that misreads a market, which a small firm cannot afford to repeat	Adapt Cost of cultural research and regional advice before every launch
Brand consistency	Standardise High, as Unilever gained by moving Britain from Jif to Cif in 2001	Adapt Lower, with a separate name or pack in each cluster
Speed of entry	Standardise Faster where the target market is culturally close to home	Adapt Slower, because research comes before the campaign
The report's verdict	Standardise Keep for the elements that travel unchanged: the app, the brand identity, the budget	Adapt Choose for the physical product, the pack, the audio and the channel

The reason is financial rather than theoretical: for a firm of this size the cost of cultural research is lower than the cost of one campaign that misreads its market. The practical consequence is that the product itself, not only the promotion, should be expected to change from country to country.

Related samples and pages:

• HRM case study on expanding a coffee chain to China, the people side of the same market-entry decision.
• Cultural differences in business, for the theory behind country clusters.
• LEGO's marketing strategy and H&M's marketing strategy, two larger brands analysed with the same mix.
• BYD Energy's marketing strategy and sustainability analysis.
• International business strategy reflection report, if your brief is reflective rather than analytical.
• All MBA assignment samples and the full list of modules we cover.

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Sources

• Bešić, C., Đorđević, D. and Bešić, S. (2017) 'Global market and new competitive relations', The Review of International Affairs, 68(1166–1167), pp. 49–64. Available at: thereviewofinternationalaffairs.rs
• Companies House (accessed 2026) CURISCOPE LIMITED, company number 10193631: company overview. Available at: find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk. Source for the incorporation date of 23 May 2016 and the dissolution date of 17 October 2023.
• Growth Business (2017) 'Mixed reality start-up Curiscope raises $1m', 4 October. Available at: growthbusiness.co.uk. Source for the $1m round led by LocalGlobe.
• Immersive Tech Network (n.d.) Curiscope's Virtuali-Tee, case study, Innovate UK. Available at: iuk.immersivetechnetwork.org. Source for the Brighton move, the product description, the October 2017 mass-market release, the 70 to 80 countries and the retail list.
• Kotler, P. (2003) Marketing Insights from A to Z: 80 Concepts Every Manager Needs to Know. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
• Kwok, S. and Uncles, M. (2005) 'Sales promotion effectiveness: the impact of consumer differences at an ethnic-group level', Journal of Product & Brand Management, 14(3), pp. 170–186. Available at: doi.org/10.1108/10610420510601049
• Malhotra, N.K., Agarwal, J. and Peterson, M. (1996) 'Methodological issues in cross-cultural marketing research: a state-of-the-art review', International Marketing Review, 13(5), pp. 7–43. Available at: doi.org/10.1108/02651339610131379
• Marketing Week (2000) 'Unilever renames Jif in global alignment move', 7 December. Available at: marketingweek.com. Source for the January 2001 rename in the UK and the "more than 80 per cent of markets" figure.
• Mariadoss, B.J. (2016) Core Principles of International Marketing, Washington State University open textbook. Available at: opentext.wsu.edu
• Onkvisit, S. and Shaw, J.J. (2004) International Marketing: Analysis and Strategy. 4th edn. London: Routledge.
• Oosthuizen, T. (2004) 'In marketing across cultures: are you enlightening the world or are you speaking in tongues?', Design Issues, 20(2), pp. 61–72. Available at: doi.org/10.1162/074793604871293
• Patrick, H.A. and Kumar, V.R. (2012) 'Managing workplace diversity: issues and challenges', SAGE Open, 2(2). Available at: doi.org/10.1177/2158244012444615
• TechRound (n.d.) 'Startup of the week: Curiscope'. Available at: techround.co.uk. Source for the crowdfunded $117,436 from over 1,700 backers and for the two product names.
• Wikipedia (2026) Cif. Available at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cif (accessed 24 September 2026). Source for the 1965 French launch and the Jif, Viss and Vim names by country.