ABSTRACT
Marketing texts often simply portray markets as wide open territory for a company with a plan. This is no such text. Turkey represents a large market with pent-up consumer demand but increasingly knowledgeable and demanding consumers, dynamic indigenous competition and lively foreign competitors. At stake, is not simply the Turkish market but all the markets to which Turkey also exports. Turkey remains an enigma to the rest of the world. To other countries in Europe, it is seen as being 97 percent in Asia. It is a secular state with no offi cial state religion, where 97 percent of the population is Moslem. Its large population of 72 million represents enormous market potential for growth as well as a seeming but hitherto unexplained religious and political challenge to the other secular nations of the EU. Like other emergent nations, its competitive challenge lies in the potential within its own indigenous market and its own indigenous industry as well as what it is able to present in terms of promise to foreign investors. This is where the challenge of foreign direct investment lies for other competing nations, and it is accelerated further by the future possibility at least of full EU membership for Turkey.
