Answer to Question 1
The BBB's subsidiaries include the National Advertising Board, the National Advertising Review Board, and the Children's Advertising Review Unit.
Answer to Question 2
Government barriers have fallen dramatically in the last years to further facilitate the globalization of markets and the activities of marketers within them. For example, the forces pushing toward a pan-European market are very powerful: the increasing wealth and mobility of European consumers, the accelerating flow of information across borders, the introduction of new products where local preferences are not well established, and the common currency. The resulting removal of physical, fiscal, and technical barriers indicates the changes that are taking place around the world on a greater scale. At the same time, rapid technological evolution is contributing to the process. With operations spread across different continents, companies regularly use teleconferencing, videoconferencing, and knowledge networks, as well as travel, and are always on the lookout for innovative methods to share information and knowledge. Newly emerging markets will benefit from advanced communications by being able to leapfrog stages of economic development. Places that until recently were incommunicado are rapidly acquiring state-of-the-art telecommunications, especially in mobile telephony, that will let them foster both internal and external development. A new group of global players is taking advantage of today's more open trading regions and newer technologies. Mini-nationals or born globals are able to serve the world from a handful of bases, compared with having to build a presence in every country as the established multinational corporations once had to do. Their smaller bureaucracies have also allowed these mini-nationals to move swiftly to seize new markets and develop new productsa key to global success. The lessons from these new-generation global players are to (1) keep focused and concentrate on being number one or two in a niche; (2) stay lean by having a small headquarters to save on costs and to accelerate decision making; (3) take ideas from wherever they can be found and solutions to wherever they are needed; (4) take advantage, regardless of nationality, of employees' ideas and experience to globalize thinking; and (5) solve customers' problems by involving them rather than pushing standardized solutions on them.
