Project Report from the year 2012 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 2,0, Southern Illinois University Carbondale (College of Business), course: International Marketing, language: English, abstract: Presented here is Carbondale Consulting Crew’s analysis of opening a new market for Arlington Plating Company’s service in the country of Japan. Included in the analysis is a very concise marketing plan, which will assist Arlington Plating Company in making the decision of whether or not they should proceed. In this marketing plan, many factors that could affect the company’s success are reviewed; such as the legal environment of Japan, the cultural and political environment, as well as the economic environment. Along with those factors is the competitive environment. We not only looked at the general competitive environment of other chroming services, but specific competition as well. In general terms, we concluded that Arlington Plating Company’s toughest competition would most likely be Japan’s quickly developing country. The continuous updating of the company’s plating technology will potentially be exhausting and a difficult hurdle to overcome. When speaking in specifics, there are a few other plating and chroming companies that will be competing in unison with our service. Furthermore, Carbondale Consulting Crew went very in-depth when carefully choosing a target market. With Japan being one of the top leaders in car and motorcycle manufacturing, it was decided it would be tactful to target the three leading car manufacturers, as well as the three leading motorcycle manufacturers: Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Yamaha, and Suzuki. Other things to consider were strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Strengths and Weaknesses included would be APC’s unique technique and sustainable competitive advantages such as patents (strength) and unawareness of doing business internationally (weakness). Opportunities and threats include the fact that Japan is one of the top vehicle manufacturers in the world (opportunity), and competition (threat). It was decided by the Carbondale Consulting Crew that Arlington Plating Company’s mode of entry would be licensing, due to the fact that contractual agreements are normally the most successful modes for business-to-business industries. Projected profits were hypothesized as well in our analysis. Finally, a plan for promotion, product, price, and physical distribution was implemented.