Levi Strauss is an international company which has seen its business expand during the last half of the twentieth century. Although the company is best known for the jeans and denim products that it produces, it has been successfully in adding various other clothing lines. Currently, the company uses local advertising agencies and creative personnel to create the advertising campaigns used in various countries. While this means that the campaigns are tailored to each specific market, there are differences in quality and message among the campaigns which the company thinks might be detrimental to its overall objectives. This report considers alternatives that the company could implement in order to build a better international advertising presence, and recommends a course of action based on those alternatives.
There are three basic alternatives from which Levi Strauss can choose with regard to its international advertising strategy. It can choose to create advertising campaigns on a local or regional basis using input and control from headquarters; this is the current strategy. The company could also choose to create advertising campaigns locally without input from headquarters, leading to a far more independent campaign which does not have corporate control. Or, the company could use centralized control to create advertising at a single point for all of the international markets.
The primary advantage of the current strategy is that it allows campaigns to be developed on a regional or local basis which take into account the cultural and national differences among the various markets. At the same time, the central headquarters is (theoretically) able to exercise control over both the creative message and the implementation of that message with the result that the company should be able to control the way its message is conveyed even though it has local appeal.
The disadvantage to this approach is that the company may en...