Guest editorial

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: International Marketing Review, Volume 33, Issue 1.

Strategic marketing in an international marketplace

Worldwide, businesses are faced with tremendous external factors that can dramatically affect efforts toward marketplace success. Whether it is natural disasters, political instability, ethnic tensions, or financial collapse, the fragility of the global economy has been evidenced extensively over the past few years. The borderless marketplace and the rapidity at which change can impact worldwide economies have made it clear that there is a vital need to understand the various phenomena that enable the forces of internationalization to wield almost instantaneous transformation, as these forces have exacerbated the level of aggressiveness in the competitive arena.

Every organization, regardless of geographic location, operates in this dynamic environment. Doing business in the constantly changing, borderless marketplace is an imperative in a marketplace in which world trade approached US$7 trillion by the beginning of the twenty-first century. This is not a situation to be feared, since change provides the opportunity for the emergence of new market opportunities. Recently, however, changes seem to be accelerating, with the potential for even greater disruption of strategic efforts raising the need for companies to increase their vigilance. Due to growing real-time access to knowledge about customers, suppliers, and competitors, the international environment is increasingly characterized by instantaneity. As such, the past has lost much of its value as a predictor of the future, and current models of consumer and firm behavior may no longer harness the reality of the twenty-first century operating environment.

Thus, the intent of this special issue is to bring together current research in international marketing in an effort to highlight current trends and growing concerns. While the fundamentals of marketing remain the same, country-by-country and day-by-day, the landscape within which these marketing fundamentals operate is changing constantly. In attempting to understand this dynamic landscape, it is not enough for marketers to merely listen to those who opine on marketing trends as one will see topics such as: the need for transparency, a better understanding of the customer value proposition, harnessing digital, more personalization, and Millennials. While we agree that these topics are critical areas within marketing, the authors appearing in this special issue of the International Marketing Review reinforce the fact that academic research truly is much more thoughtful than popular press, “hot” buttons.

The seven articles in this issue cover a wide range of topics and geographic regions. Topic-wise within the marketing domain, the authors explored: product placement, the positioning of popular music, the outsourcing of services, service quality, marketing channels, environmentally friendly products, and product endorsement. Geographically, the research presented in this issue was conducted in, or about, a variety of locations: the UK, Hong Kong, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Chile, Nigeria, Mexico, and Austria. With this variety of topics and geographic representation, it was not surprising to see that the overlapping component to all of the articles was the impact of various aspects of culture.

Culture

Culture is the key overarching connector for all of the articles in this special issue. Culture is a critical component of global marketing success, as the understanding of the wants and needs of consumers across a wide geographic landscape is dictated by cultural experiences and values. Using content analysis, Chan, Petrovici, and Lowe explored product placement in high grossing films within the UK and Hong Kong. Of the nine cultural dimensions identified by GLOBE researchers, assertiveness, and performance orientation were found to interact with brand attitude and purchase intention with regards to product placement, requiring marketers to make critical adjustments in placement execution in motion pictures across different cultures. Continuing along the lines of entertainment, Chen's focus on culture was in the context of cultural technology as related to South Korean popular music – the K-pop industry. Referred to as hallyu, the Korean Wave has become a prominent export for the region. Chen offers an idol-making system as a new marketing paradigm for the exporting of cultural content.

Shifting out of the entertainment category, the paper by Livanis, Robertson, Al-Shuaibi, and Hussain examines how country-of-origin perceptions of managers can affect provider selection for offshoring and offshore-outsourcing in the services sector. Basically, the authors report that buyers from developing countries prefer suppliers from developed countries over suppliers from culturally distant developing countries, but they also found that these same buyers will seek out suppliers from developing countries with shared social traits, like religion. In addition to extending the cultural concerns evidenced in this special issue, this paper is the first in a series of three articles in this issue that focus on culture and developing economies. With regards to consumers' cultural differences, Guesalaga, Pierce, and Scaraboto found that country-of-origin was not an effective means of segmenting customers. Interestingly, foreign consumers may actually be similar to local consumers in terms of cultural values. The authors suggest that variations in cultural values may account for differences in consumers' expectations with regard to service quality and, in turn, affect consumer satisfaction levels and feelings of loyalty to services in emerging markets. Onyemah and Akpa explore the cultural uniqueness of open air markets in Nigeria, an important market representing about 20 percent of Africa's total population. In doing so, the authors suggest that even channel members' roles may vary in emerging markets, with this variation attributable to cultural differences in the marketplace.

Religion, which is certainly a key component of culture, plays a primary role in the final two articles in the special issue. Felix and Braunsberger report that consumers with higher levels of intrinsic religious orientation have a higher propensity to buy environmentally friendly products. In particular, the authors suggest that Catholic social norms could be leveraged to promote green behaviors among the general Mexican population. The authors also provide policy implications for foreign governments and utilities to promote and facilitate pro-environmental changes. Schlegelmilch, Khan, and Hair examine the impact of religious endorsements and find that products with the Halal endorsement lower the willingness among Christians to purchase the products. This is particularly timely given the rapid increase in the use of these types of endorsements to reach Muslim consumers in predominately non-Muslim societies. Thus, it seems that religious targeting is critical in managing the purchase process. Not surprisingly, the paper by Livanis, Robertson, Al-Shuaibi, and Hussain had also reported a positive relationship when it comes to the sharing of a common cultural attribute such as religion.

Another particularly important aspect of culture is the role of language. Chen found that language is a key variable when it comes to the exporting of South Korean popular music. As well, Guesalaga, Pierce, and Scaraboto note that language mastery might impact consumer expectations and the evaluation of services in local markets.

The fundamentals of international marketing

As evidenced in the research that has been conducted over the past several years and reported in this special issue, the fundamentals of international marketing are still very much the same. While digital marketing and the Millennial consumer, for example, may be front and center with regards to the changing landscape of doing business around the world, the value placed on capturing the fundamental components of culture in international marketing strategic decision making remains at the forefront of our research. Essentially, without an understanding of the core, marketers would be managing tactically instead of strategically.

Professor John Ford

Department of Marketing, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, USA

Professor Vicky Crittenden

Marketing Division, Babson College, Babson Park, Massachusetts, USA