Global marketing strategies and applications

Global Marketing - Mexico

Mexico has been plagued with brutal drug-related violence over the past few decades, so that is the main story that gets into the newspapers and on television, but there is another Mexico, and in this paper economic and cultural aspects of Mexico will be reviewed.

Mexican Cultural Analysis: There are about 114,975,406 residents in Mexico, and 60% of the Mexican population is "mestizo" (Amerindian-Spanish, meaning, some Spanish blood and some native Indian blood); 30% of the population is Amerindian or "predominantly Amerindian"; 9% of the population is "white"; and 1% is "other" (CIA World Factbook). About 92.7% of Mexicans speak Spanish "only"; 5.7% speak Spanish along with "indigenous languages" (Mayan, Nahuatl, and other regional languages).

As to religion, 76.5% of Mexicans a members of the Roman Catholic faith; 5.2% are Protestant (and within the Protestant grouping are Pentecostals -- 1.4% and "other" 3.8%); 1.1% are Jehovah's Witnesses and the "unspecified" and "none" categories make up about 17% (CIA). Mexico is a relatively young nation in terms of its people, as only 6.6% of the country is 65 years of age or older; 65.2% of the population is between 15 and 64 years of age; and 28.2% of the Mexican population is 14 years of age or under (CIA).

Seventy-eight percent of the Mexican population live in urban areas, and in fact Mexico City is the second-largest urban population in the Western Hemisphere (the largest is Sao Paulo, Brazil). The life expectancy of a Mexican male is 73.84 years, and a female is expected to live 79.63 years. The major infectious diseases that strike Mexicans include food and waterborne diseases (bacterial diarrhea, hepatitis a, and typhoid fever), and the obesity rate for adults is 23.6%, compared with an obesity rate of 13% for the world's population.

As to literacy, 86.1% of males and 85.3% of females over 15 can read and write; moreover, the average male and female Mexican are in school 14 years (primary to tertiary education) (CIA).

Mexican Economy: The resources that help the Mexican economy include petroleum (oil), silver, copper, gold, lead, zinc, natural gas, and timber (CIA World Factbook). Mexico has a free market economy (into the trillions of dollars), featuring a mix of "modern and outmoded industry and agriculture," the CIA Factbook explains. Mexican leaders in recent years have expanded the country's airports, seaports, telecommunications, railroads, natural gas distributions and electrical generation, the CIA World Factbook reports.

The per capita income for Mexico is only a third of the per capita income of the United States, and the GDP (purchasing power parity) is an estimated $1.675 trillion (based on 2011 figures). The country's "real growth rate" (as of 2011) is 3.8%. By sector, the GDP is: 3.9% from agriculture; 32.8% from industry; and 63.4% from services (including tourism), based on 2011 data. An estimated 47.77 million people are in the Mexican workforce and 13.7% of those 47.77 million are in agriculture; 23.4% are working in industry; and 62.9% are employed in the services sector of Mexico.