Dissertation topic selection and framework development

Business

International Marketing -- the Barriers that must be overcome in a World of Trade with no Boundaries

The database that I chose to use was that of EBSCOhost. I chose this because it is a database that is used for scholarly research and information needs. It can be used to explore collection of academic and professional journals. I used to the following key words in order to do my research: International, marketing, and barriers. Before beginning my research I took the tutorial that was available for EBSCOhost. In this tutorial I learned how to do limited searches as well as how to save searches and alerts.

In looking at the thesaurus on the database in regards to my search topic, it was suggested that I might also search for international trade, economic development, tourism, barriers to entry (industrial organization), capitalists & financiers. These suggestions could be used to expand the search range in order to come up with more material.

Boolean logic is a system that uses logical operators. Involves variables with two values, using and, or, and NOT. Doing a search using international and marketing would bring back results containing both of the words. A search using international or marketing would return a result of articles containing either of the words. A search done using international NOT marketing would return results that contain international but not results that contained international and marketing.

Boolean logic could be used to restrict my search by using the and, or and NOT operators in my searches to try and get the results that I desire.

In order to increase my database skills my exploring the database in order to learn about all the functions that it has to offer. There are a lot of interesting tools that can be used while searching. For example, one can limit searches to bring back only articles that contain full text, along with articles that are peer reviewed.

In the research that I did there were a couple of interesting statistics that I uncovered. It seems as if the tourism in Malaysia is heaving influenced by many factors including disease, environmental problems and terrorism. The average hotel occupancy in Penang has fluctuated between 60% in 1998 and 53% in 2002. Because of this fluctuation hotels often find themselves with an over abundance of rooms. Many hotels have competed to offer discounts (as much as 30% of the original rack rate). One all inclusive hotel that was priced at more than $700 per room had to lower its rate by 70% because of low occupancy (Kasim, 2007).

In looking at the virtual reference shelf of the Library of Congress it was interesting to see that there were several resources that could be used to investigate the topic of international marketing and its relation to trade barriers. Once source that I found that could be used for research purposes, pertains to data related to international trade. Another tool that I found is that of a section called research tools. This looked like it could be used for researching any topic that a person wanted to.