The global marketplace today encompasses 6 billion people. Many companies are beginning to see themselves as international rather than national acting on a global arena. An essential aspect of going abroad is to know where to go and why to go there. In order to be able to analyze a foreign market a company needs to do market research in the foreign market as to gather essential information. A firm which is facing a quick internationalization process is the Swedish direct sales firm of cosmetics Oriflame. Oriflame has grown quickly in developing countries but is not present in one of the biggest market for direct sales in Europe: France.

The purpose of this thesis is to develop a theoretical framework to analyze foreign markets and apply it to the French market of direct sales in cosmetics and Oriflame.

A qualitative study based on the 5 Cs framework for analyzing foreign markets has been carried out. Seven focus groups have been conducted in France and Sweden in order to obtain information about and comparability in consumer attitudes towards Oriflame’s marketing mix. Interviews have been conducted in order to get information about Oriflame as a company. Secondary data has been gathered from different sources for the theoretical framework as well as for the empirical research on issues such as culture, competition and market.

This thesis has developed a theoretical framework to analyze foreign markets called the 5 Cs. The 5 Cs are based on: Company, Constitution, Competition, Customers and Culture. The 5 Cs is a very general framework and can be applied to a wide range of foreign markets and firms and was in this case applied to analyze a real world case of Oriflame and France. The analysis of the empirical findings found that there is potential for Oriflame to enter the French market in terms of consumer preferences and general market characteristics. However, it also found that what will probably determine everything in the end is whether Oriflame can be strategically committed to enter a mature West European market like France.