1As the era of globalization continues to manifest through the emergence of global companies, the use of marketing programs in these firms has become increasingly important. This research examines global marketing program-related factors, their drivers, and their performance consequences. The global marketing program, as the authors conceptualize it, consists of three key factors: global marketing strategy, global marketing structure, and global marketing processes. The authors develop and test an empirical model to portray the application of the global marketing program factors with respect to product standardization and product processes. As such, global customer convergence and leadership's global orientation have significant, positive effects on global product standardization and global marketing structure. The authors find that global product standardization and global marketing structure drive the implementation of global product processes, which are positively related to marketing performance.The environmental forces of globalization have provided means for the fittest of multinational corporations (MNCs) to thrive in a new world in which suppliers, competitors, and customers are no longer bound by the nation-state, or even region. Free trade and business acumen have found a way to achieve what none has been able to before: a convergence in consumer attitudes and behaviors, which can be satisfied only by organizations that operate beyond traditional geographic and cultural boundaries. The key to success for companies in this age comes from the ability to accommodate the forces that create mutual desires; the true challenge for marketing managers is to implement marketing concepts through processes that link the organization and the customer.In general, it is accepted that marketing is a complex set of functions that involve tactics, or the act of demand stimulation and selling; culture, which provides a means to implement a customer orientation; and strategy, which translates the marketing concept into actions that create competitive advantage (Webster 2002). Although the relative importance of how well a firm's strategies fit with an environment has been explored (Vekatraman and Prescott 1990), as has the importance of the fit between the marketing structure and processes with a firm's strategy (Srivastava, Shervani, and

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In this study, an approximation to the solution of the renewal integral equation is constructed. Performance of the new method is evaluated and it is shown that the approximation provides an upper bound for the renewal function when the hazard function is a non-increasing function of time.

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