Flawed ways to pursue competitive efforts that will successfully differentiate a company's branded footwear from the branded offerings of rival companies include O failing to spend heavily on best practices training in all of the company's production facilities. O failing to have a product line that includes 500 models/styles of branded footwear, underspending on branded and search engine advertising in all four regions, and charging Internet and wholesale prices that are too high to enable the company to be the market share leader in these two segments in at least 2 of the 4 geographic regions. o striving only to achieve weak differentiation (as opposed to strong differentiation) from the branded footwear offerings of other companies also pursuing competitive efforts to differentiate their product offerings. not charging prices for branded footwear price that are slightly below the industry-average wholesale price and the industry-average Internet retail price in all four geographic regions. failing to spend more on mail-in rebates than any other rival in each of the four geographic regions and underspending on efforts to secure celebrity endorsement contracts. Valid reasons why a company should definitely open a new production facility in Latin America include o the much weaker competition in both the branded footwear segment and the private-label segment that prevails in Latin America, which acts to boost profits on footwear sales in Latin America. o the strong preference that Latin American consumers have for purchasing different models/styles of branded footwear, as compared to consumers in the other 3 regions (a Latin America production facility can produce models/styles that exactly match the preferences of Latin American consumers). o the strong preference that Latin American consumers have for purchasing branded footwear with a lower S//Q rating, as compared to North American or European consumers (a Latin America production facility can produce footwear with an S/Q rating that exactly matches the preferences of Latin American consumers). the fact that Latin America is the lowest cost region in the world in which to produce and market athletic footwear (based on cost of pairs sold, as reported on p. 7 of the FIR). o being able to avoid paying import tariffs on footwear produced and sold in Latin America; moreover, the freight costs on pairs shipped from a production facility in Latin America to the Latin American distribution center are lower than the freight costs on pairs shipped from production facilities outside Latin America to the Latin American distribution center. An appealing strategy that a company can use to reduce its exposure to adverse exchange rate adjustments to the costs of pairs shipped to a distribution warehouse from a production facility in a different geographic region is to not worry about them--the sizes of the favorable and unfavorable exchange rate adjustments in each geographic region will cancel each out over the various decision rounds and thus have no net effect on the company over the long run. o invest in sufficient production capacity in each of the four geographic regions to greatly reduce (maybe even eliminate) the need to ship pairs to a distribution warehouse from a production facility in a different geographic region--such a strategy has the highly attractive added benefit of cutting/eliminating tariff payments on imported footwear. O greatly curtail shipments of pairs from production facilities to regions having an unfavorable/adverse exchange rate adjustment. o build production facilities in geographic regions where there are adverse exchange rate cost adjustments and ship pairs from these facilities to regions where there are favorable exchange rate cost adjustments. always lower the prices of all footwear sold in a geographic region by the full amount of any adverse exchange rate adjustment per pair that the company incurs in that region; profits on the added sales volume normally offset the costs associated with the unfavorable exchange rate adjustment