where to start your int'l career

A franchise is an excellent place to start learning international marketing, and I'm not just saying that because it's how it happened for me.

A well established, serious franchise organization is built around unitary concept, has a standard product, a clear business model, and an operational system in place.

In my company's case, the business logic was that the more countries were covered by the franchisees’ network, the stronger the overall service was.

This placed our Romanian franchisee in a chain of 65+ other countries members, mainly throughout Europe. That meant lots and lots of international marketing knowledge accessible: we were talking to the more-experienced countries for best-practice level, and to our colleagues from neighboring countries to share experience and findings about our similar markets.

So if you're joining the marketing team of a B2B franchise business, part of a multi-country network, you get:

• a well-established brand, 
• centralized marketing support [this is one of the main strengths of a franchise],
• everything well documented,
• training available,

...plus you get to learn from the other countries' experience,

...plus you join an international network of peers specialized in selling, to their home markets, the product you have to sell in your own country.

Even though the regulations and support are centralized, often the franchisees can be engaged in the marketing strategy, as I've seen happening in the B2B network I used to work for. In fact, one of the best product innovations that were launched while I was working there came from a Czech franchisee, was quickly adopted by the parent company and then spread and localized in the whole network.

What you get to do while doing marketing for a multinational franchised company:

- learn a lot,

- localize plenty,

- adapt a global concept to national specificity,

- be exposed to high quality marketing collaterals and communication,

- be part of a multi-country business and see how it's done.

And if you're lucky and your company brings a new concept to your home market, you get to:

- introduce something new & cool,

- position your company as innovative,

- educate your market.