Licensing to Meet Overseas Marketing Objectives

This thesis is being archived as a Digitized Shelf Copy for campus access to current students and staff only. We currently cannot provide this open access without the author's permission. If you are the author of this work and desire to provide it open access or wish access removed please contact the Wahlstrom Library to discuss permission.Licensing is but one approach management may utilize to accomplish overseas marketing objectives. To say that managements of various domestic companies engaged in international trade effectively employ this tool would presuppose planned approaches to licensing. No contention will be presented as to whether or not domestic companies employ licensing effectively. The very nature of the argument would be unwieldy since the conclusion would be subjective and dependent upon the individual goals of the organizations surveyed. Further, it is doubtful whether responsible persons in the individual organizations would allow the information necessary to debate such a contention, to be made public and available to sc rutinization by competition. Rather, from the meager literature available on the subject, it may be deduced that licensing is usually not incorporated into a planned sequence of establishment of overseas marketing objectives and appraisal of various means for goal attainment. Two survey attempts probably support such a deduction. For most of the companies examined, one of the surveys reported foreign licensing merely implemented an export program. A conclusion from the other was that licensing agreements were usually enacted following initial market penetrations by other means. In the following paper, licensing will be presented not as a defensive tool; that is, not as a means of retaining threatened established markets primarily, but as an alternative marketing management should consider in planning overseas objectives. Moreover, since licensing agreements are usually prepared by experts in tax, anti-trust, and other legal considerations, an emphasis on these aspects exists in the literature. The following paper will avoid these considerations, wherever possible, in an effort to present the type of information which would be of interest to marketing management, particularly in those companies which have as yet not entered the foreign market, or having already done so, wish to expand