Export marketing strategy implementation,export marketing capabilities,and export venture performance

Since exporting is the most popular mechanism by which firms engage with international markets, understanding the drivers of export market performance is key to explaining firms’ international competitiveness. The literature posits that the effective implementation of planned export marketing strategy is a key determinant of the performance of firms operating in international markets. Yet little is known about the specific nature and drivers of export marketing strategy implementation effectiveness. In this study we build on the implementation literature in marketing and strategic management to develop a new conceptualization of export marketing strategy implementation effectiveness. Drawing on dynamic capabilities theory, we empirically examine the export marketing capability antecedents and performance consequences of export marketing strategy implementation effectiveness in the context of manufacturing firms that are exporting to international markets. Results indicate that effective implementation of planned export marketing strategy contributes to export market and financial performance, and that marketing capabilities play an important role in enabling effective marketing strategy implementation in export venture operations.     

General alliance experience,uncertainty, and marketing alliance governance mode choice

Drawing from transaction cost economics (TCE), the knowledge-based view (KBV), and real options theory (ROT), we propose that the general alliance experience of alliance partner firms moderates the impact of market uncertainty and alliance-specific uncertainty on the benefits and costs of the two marketing alliance governance modes, i.e., non-equity alliances and joint ventures. Based on our systematic study of 18,616 marketing alliances occurring in 48 industries across 164 countries between 1992 and 2008, we find general alliance experience significantly moderates firms’ marketing alliance governance mode choices. Our framework reconciles some contradictory empirical results in the interfirm relationship governance structure literature by emphasizing the moderating role of partner firms’ general alliance experience. Specifically, when alliances can be characterized has having a large cultural distance between the partners or having a market with a broad geographic scope, it seems that TCE predictions regarding the marketing alliance governance mode choice hold for inexperienced firms while KBV and ROT predictions hold for experienced firms. In addition, by incorporating key aspects of all three theories, our proposed framework has the potential to provide deeper insights into the role of alliance experience and uncertainty in firms’ marketing alliance governance mode choices.     

Transaction cost economics and its uses in marketing

Scholarship at the intersection of transaction cost economics (TCE) and marketing has enjoyed an impressive record of growth over the past three decades, and the future promises more of the same. Following Erin Anderson’s perceptive uses of TCE in her 1982 dissertation, the field of marketing has made many constructive uses of and contributions to TCE, where the latter include broadening the reach of TCE, posing important challenges, and identifying opportunities still to be addressed. Given this history, we advance the proposition that the relation between TCE and marketing has been and should be a two-way street. In considering the scope for future research, we give special attention to issues of asymmetric costs, the dynamics of governance, and disequilibrium contracting. We also discuss the four precepts of pragmatic methodology, with special emphasis on prediction and empirical testing. The Appendix provides added perspective on the evolving “science of organization” of which TCE is a part.     

Foreign market entry mode choice of service firms: A contingency perspective

Research on how service firms choose their initial mode of operation in foreign markets appears to have led to two contradictory conclusions. Findings from one group of studies suggest that factors determining entry mode choice by manufacturing firms are generalizable to service firms. Findings from another group of studies contradict that view. The authors reconcile the two views by means of a classification scheme that allows some services to be grouped with manufactured goods in terms of entry mode choice. A conceptual model of factors affecting the entry mode choice of service firms is proposed, research propositions are developed, and managerial implications and future research directions are discussed. Ikechi Ekeledo is a doctoral candidate in marketing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research interests include international marketing, services marketing, and strategic market planning. K. Sivakumar (Ph.D., Syracuse University, 1992) is an associate professor of marketing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research interests include pricing, international marketing, and innovation management. His research has been published or is forthcoming inBarron’s, International Marketing Review, theJournal of Business Research, theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Marketing Theory & Practice, theJournal of Product Innovation Management, theJournal of Social Behavior & Personality, Marketing Letters, Marketing Science Institute’s Working Paper Series, and Pricing Strategy & Practice: An International Journal, and summarized as Editors’ Briefings inHarvard Business Review. He has won several awards for research and is on the editorial boards of four scholarly journals.     

Achieving relationship marketing effectiveness in business-to-business exchanges

Relationship marketing research and practice operate according to the paradigm that firms should invest in relationship marketing to build better relationships, which will generate improved financial performance. However, findings that relationship marketing efforts vary in their effectiveness across customers and may even be detrimental to performance challenge this belief. This article, therefore, offers a theoretical model that addresses three key issues: 1) what factors determine a customer’s need for relational governance (relationship orientation); 2) what mediating mechanism captures the negative effects of relationship marketing on performance (exchange inefficiency); and 3) how does a customer’s relationship orientation determine the effectiveness of relationship marketing, thus allowing for effective segmentation. The authors demonstrate in an empirical study that the trust in the salesperson and exchange inefficiency both mediate the effect of relationship marketing on seller financial outcomes. In addition, customers’ relationship orientation moderates the impact of relationship marketing on both trust and exchange inefficiency.     

Marketing and business performance

Academics and managers have struggled for many years to understand and delineate the role of marketing in explaining business performance differences between firms. Most of the theory base for any such attempts has to be informed by strategic management theory, since the primary question that strategic management seeks to answer is why some firms outperform others over time. This paper synthesizes three major streams of thought in strategic management with the empirical and theoretical literature on strategic marketing to develop an integrative theory-based conceptual framework linking marketing with firms’ business performance.     

Consumer ethnocentrism offline and online: The mediating role of marketing efforts and personality traits in the United States, South Korea, and India

Consumer ethnocentrism is an important concept that is used to understand international marketing phenomena. In this article, the authors conduct two empirical studies. Using consumer data from the United States, South Korea, and India (three diverse cultural and economic environments), they explore six hypotheses. In Stage 1, the results suggest that across all three countries, consumer ethnocentrism provokes negative attitudes toward both foreign advertisements and foreign products. The authors identify a set of consumer variables (i.e., consumers’ global mind-set) that may mediate consumers’ unfavorable attitudes toward foreign advertisements and products derived by consumer ethnocentrism. In Stage 2, the authors find that consumer ethnocentrism dampens consumers’ online consumption activities on a foreign Web site. Finally, the authors find that marketers’ e-mail communications to foreign consumers mediate consumer ethnocentrism in online environments. Hyokjin Kwak (hkwak@drexel.edu) is an assistant professor of marketing at Drexel University. His research interests include advertising effects, consumer communications, and strategic marketing. He has publications in theJournal of Consumer Psychology, theJournal of Advertising Research, theJournal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising, theJournal of Consumer Marketing, and other marketing journals. Anupam Jaju (ajaju@gmu.edu) is an assistant professor of marketing in the School of Management at George Mason University. His main research interests are in marketing strategy, marketing-technology interface, and international marketing. His work has been published in theJournal of International Management, Marketing Theory, andMarketing Education Review. Trina Larsen Andras (published as Trina Larsen, larsent@ drexel.edu) is a professor and the head of the Marketing Department at Drexel University. Her research has been published in many of the major professional journals in her field, includingHarvard Business Review, theColumbia Journal of World Business, International Marketing Review, Industrial Marketing Management, Management International Review, theJournal of Global Marketing, and theJournal of International Marketing, among others. Her research is focused on international marketing, specifically, cross-cultural behavioral and relationship issues in international marketing management.     

Developing global products and marketing strategies: A rejoinder

In this issue of JAMS, Dr. Lyn Amine presents a “comment and an extension” to our previously published article. Such efforts are often constructive, and in this spirit, we present a discussion responding to Dr. Amine’s comments. Our response, combined with Dr. Amine’s comments, hopefully will provide constructive research avenues in international product and marketing strategy development. He has published extensively in the areas of international marketing and retailing. His research and publication areas include international marketing, high tech marketing, and advertising management. His research and publication interests include sales management, international marketing, and retail management.     

A critical note on “This time is different”

This article is structured as follows: the first section is based on Reinhart and Rogoff’s seminal papers (Am Econ Rev 98(2):339–344, 2008a, b, Am Econ Rev 99(2):466–472, 2009a, This time is different: eight centuries of financial folly, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2009b, Am Econ Rev 100(2):573–578, 2010) and text book (2009), which today constitute the new cornerstones of conventional wisdom on the recurrence of financial crises throughout History, their development and aftermath. We deliver a critical view of this attempt to infer some systematic empirical relationship between debt, growth and inflation and underline the absence of core variables in this historical analysis. In Sect. 3, we go back 10 years to illustrate that conventional wisdom was much different at that time, emphasizing the peculiarity of each episode of the financial crises. This raises the issue of the relevancy of the cliometric approach to identify regularities down through History: so, should we trust cliometricians?     

Corporate citizenship: Cultural antecedents and business benefits

The article explores the nature of corporate citizenship and its relevance for marketing practitioners and academic researchers. Specifically, a conceptualization and operationalization of corporate citizenship are first proposed. Then, an empirical investigation conducted in two independent samples examines whether components of an organization’s culture affect the level of commitment to corporate citizenship and whether corporate citizenship is conducive to business benefits. Survey results suggest that market-oriented cultures as well as humanistic cultures lead to proactive corporate citizenship, which in turn is associated with improved levels of employee commitment, customer loyalty, and business performance. The results point to corporate citizenship as a potentially fruitful business practice both in terms of internal and external marketing. Isabelle Maignan is an assistant professor of marketing and international business at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Her research interests focus on business ethics, corporate social responsibility, and international marketing. Her work has appeared in theJournal of Advertising, Journal of Business Research, and theJournal of Business Ethics, as well as other journals and conference proceedings. O. C. Ferrell is a professor of marketing at Colorado State University. He is the coauthor of 16 books and 60 articles. His work has appeared in theJournal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Business Research, and theJournal of Public Policy and Marketing, as well as other journals and proceedings. G. Tomas M. Hult is the director of international business and an associate professor of marketing and international business at Florida State University. His research interests focus on marketing strategy, international marketing, and methodological issues in marketing. Dr. Hult’s work has appeared in theJournal of Marketing, Decision Sciences, Journal of Business Research, Journal of International Marketing, andInternational Marketing Review, as well as other journals and proceedings.     

Offshoring and international competitiveness: antecedents of offshoring advanced tasks

During the past decade, offshoring has become an established business practice. Yet it is still more common to offshore less advanced tasks compared with offshoring more advanced tasks, i.e., tasks closer to the core activities of the firm. The latter is a new phenomenon which raises many new issues on the boundaries of the firm. More or less advanced tasks can be found within all activities, e.g., in sales and marketing where telesales is on the less advanced end of the scale while branding and identity building are on the advanced end of the scale. This article focuses on the antecedents of advanced offshoring, exploring what causes firms to offshore some of their more advanced tasks. Our findings indicate that while the lower cost of unskilled, labor-intensive processes is the main driver for firms that offshore less advanced tasks, the offshoring of advanced tasks is part of firms’ strategy to achieve international competitiveness through access to cross-border knowledge flows and foreign knowledge resources. Furthermore, offshoring of advanced manufacturing tasks seems to be more widespread and experience-based than the offshoring of advanced service tasks.     

A provider-cost/patron-effort schema for classifying products

Since the commodity-oriented thinkers of marketing’s early history, marketers have sought a valid schema for classifying products. Currently, the marketing literature is dominated by two types of schemata for classifying products: product-based and consumer cost-based. Despite marketing tenets such asexchange is the focal notion of marketing andgood marketing theory integrates the perspectives of firms and consumers, no existing schema embodies either exchange or a dual firm/consumer perspective. After reviewing the existing classificational schemata, one such schema is proposed and evaluated. The two classifying dimensions of this schema are providers’ relative variable costs (PRVC) and patrons’ relative effort (PRE). Crossing high and low levels of PRVC and PRE yields four product categories: low cost/effort, patroneffort heavy, provider-cost heavy, and high cost/effort. His work has appeared inJournal of Marketing, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Retailing, Journal of Advertising, International Journal of Advertising, Business Horizons, Business Ethics: A European Review, and other journals. His current research interests include marketing theory, advertising, and ethics. He received his Ph.D. in marketing from Purdue University. will soon receive his Ph.D. in marketing from the University of North Texas. His work has appeared inAcademy of Management Journal, as well as the proceedings of the American Marketing Association, the Decision Science Association, and the Society of Franchising. His research interests include building and testing models in international marketing, consumer behavior, and marketing management. His current research interests include self-referent processing of advertisements and consumer satisfaction.     

National culture and industrial buyer-seller relationships in the United States and Latin America

This study examined whether national culture directly moderates the link between buyer-seller relationship strength and repurchase intentions in industrial markets, as well as indirectly moderates the same link through its influence on corporate culture. Hypotheses were tested using a mail survey among industrial buyers in the United States and Latin America. Results based on 126 responses from Latin American firms and 81 responses from U.S. firms showed that national culture and corporate culture moderate the relationship-repurchase link and that national culture is associated with corporate culture. Using national culture index scores computed from administering Hofstede’s Value Survey Module 94, the authors further show that uncertainty avoidance is the primary driver of national culture’s influence on this link and that power distance is most directly associated with corporate culture. Kelly Hewett (kelly_hewett@moore.sc.edu) is in the Department of Marketing at the Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina. Her research focuses on the management of relationships between buyers and sellers, as well as between headquarters and foreign subsidiaries in managing the marketing function globally. Her research has been published in theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and theJournal of International Business Studies, among others. R. Bruce Money (moneyb@byu.edu) is the Donald Staheli Fellow and an associate professor of marketing and international business in the Marriott School of Management, Brigham Young University. His articles have been published in journals such as theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, theJournal of International Business Studies, andSloan Management Review. His research interests include the international aspects of national culture’s measurement and effects, business-to-business marketing, word-of-mouth promo-tion, services marketing, and negotiation. Subhash Sharma (sharma@moore.sc.edu) is the James F. Kane Professor of Business in the Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina. Professor Sharma’s research interests include marketing strategy, structural equation modeling, data mining, customer relationship management, e-commerce, the marketing-operations interface, and global marketing strategies. He has published numerous articles in these areas in leading academic journals such as theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Marketing, Marketing Science, theJournal of Retailing, theJournal of Operations Management, theInternational Journal of Research in Marketing, and Management Science. Professor Sharma has also authored two textbooks:Applied Multivariate Techniques (John Wiley, 1996) andScaling Procedures: Issues and Applications (with Richard G. Netemeyer and William O. Bearden, Sage, 2003). Professor Sharma was a member of the editorial boards of theJournal of Marketing Research and theJournal of Marketing and currently serves on the editorial review board of theJournal of Retailing.     

Leveraged high-variety strategies: From portfolio thinking to platform thinking

Summary Barbara Kahn correctly points out the importance of creating dynamic relationships with customers and adopting high-variety strategies to succeed in today’s fiercely competitive world. However, high variety is also often high cost and high complexity. In this commentary, I propose that platform thinking is a powerful way to manage these contradictions in becoming a high-variety provider. Platform thinking relies on a simple insight—understand the common strands that tie your firm’s offerings, markets, and processes together, and exploit these commonalities to create leveraged growth and variety. Platform thinking should permeate all aspects of the firm’s strategy and should guide all strategic decisions on diversification and growth. Marketers who master platform thinking may find the 21st century to be a somewhat more inviting prospect. Mohanbir S. Sawhney is an assistant professor of marketing in the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University. His research interests include strategic marketing in technology-based industries, marketing decisions for experiential products, and cross-functional integration in new product development. His research has been published inManagement Science andMarketing Science, and his modeling work in the motion picture industry has been widely cited in the trade press. He is a consultant for several large technology firms as well as small Internet start-up firms. His current research projects include strategic planning for market-driving firms, cross-functional product line management, and strategy formulation for digital opportunity arenas.     

Export marketing,interfunctional interactions,and performance consequences

Firms with export operations have internal environments that are often geared toward serving the home market. As a result, export marketing and other business functions compete for resources, which thus increases the likelihood of conflict between them. Using survey responses from more than 700 exporting firms, the authors test a model of the antecedents and consequences of two important interaction variables: exporting’s interfunctional connectedness and conflict. The model explains 52 percent and 49 percent of variance in exporting connectedness and conflict, respectively. The authors identify the key drivers of successful interactions as follows: management commitment, organizational training and reward systems, relative functional identification, centralization, and export employee job satisfaction and commitment. The authors also demonstrate that connectedness is most critical for export success when export markets are in a state of turbulence, whereas conflict is most detrimental when the firm’s export environment is stable. John W. Cadogan (j.w.cadogan@lboro.ac.uk), Ph.D., is a professor of marketing in the Business School at Loughborough University, United Kingdom. His primary areas of research interest are international marketing, marketing strategy, and sales management. He has published on these issues in theJournal of International Business Studies, theInternational Journal of Research in Marketing, theJournal of Business Research, Industrial Marketing Management, theEuropean Journal of Marketing, theInternational Marketing Review, theJournal of Marketing Management, theJournal of Strategic Marketing, and other academic journals. He received his degree from the University of Wales (United Kingdom). Sanna Sundqvist (sanna.sundqvist@lut.fi), Ph.D., is a professor in international marketing in the Department of Business Administration at the Lappeenranta University of Technology (Finland). Her research interests deal with the international diffusion of innovations, market orientation (especially in an international context), and consumers’ adoption behavior. She has published in theJournal of Business Research, theInternational Journal of Research in Marketing, theEuropean Journal of Marketing, theCanadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, and theAustralasian Marketing Journal. She received her degree from the Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland. Risto T. Saiminen (risto.salminen@lut.fi), Ph.D., is a professor of industrial engineering and management, especially marketing, in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland. His primary areas of research interest are customer relationships and networks in business marketing, pedagogy in industrial engineering and management, and international marketing. He has published on these issues in theJournal of Business and Industrial Marketing, theJournal of Marketing Management, theEuropean Journal of Engineering Education, theInternational Journal of Research in Marketing, theEuropean Journal of Marketing, and theAustralasian Marketing Journal. He received his degree from Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland. Kaisu Puumalainen (kaisu.puumalainen@lut.fi), Ph.D., is a professor in technology research in the Department of Business Administration at Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland. Her primary areas of research interest are innovation, international marketing, and small businesses. She has published on these issues in theInternational Journal of Research in Marketing, theJournal of Business Research, theEuropean Journal of Marketing, R&D Management, theCanadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, theJournal of International Entrepreneurship, theAustralasian Marketing Journal, and theInternational Journal of Production Economics. She received her degree from the Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland.     

Developing global products and marketing strategies: A construct and a research agenda

The U.S. trade deficit brings to question the effectiveness of international marketing strategies of American firms. Multinational corporations must develop better international products and improve their performance in their international marketing efforts. They must know when to globalize or localize their marketing practices. This article incorporates learning, involvement, diffusion/adoption and culture context as dimensions of a global product and marketing strategy development decision model. The model developed is “be global, act local.” The interrelationship of consumer behavior models in the context of a multinational product development decision is emphasized. This article raises research issues which need to be addressed for future success in multinational and/or multicultural markets.     

Reflections on international marketing: destructive regeneration and multinational firms

Constant in the evolution of the business enterprise has been its relentless search for competitive advantage. What has been phenomenally different about this quest is that it is, increasingly, a global landscape that defines the firm’s opportunities and challenges. The global marketplace has always been dynamic and complex in terms of the changes it brings, but the last two decades have been exceptionally transformational. In terms of opportunities, firms pursuing international customers have never before faced such open markets, rise in discretionary income, and modern tools for accessing global markets. In terms of challenges, intense competition, complexity of managing multiple markets and coordinating marketing strategy, a host of risk elements, and the sheer difficulty of managing geographic, cultural, and political barriers are among the factors which impede the firm’s success in global markets. Often, these changes come in the form of radical, transformative disruptions. This essay draws attention to major disruptions impacting international marketers and provides insights for appropriate firm response.     

Fundamental changes in marketing organization: The movement toward a customer-focused organizational structure

There has been growing interest in the future of marketing and changes in marketing’s organization and role within the firm. However, there has not been research that holistically explores key changes in marketing organization. The authors draw on qualitative interviews with 50 managers in the United States and Germany and argue that changes in marketing organization that have been discussed in isolation are part of a more general shift toward customer-focused organizational structures. They initially discuss two specific changes related to the overall shift: changes concerning primary marketing coordinators and increasing dispersion of marketing activities. They then introduce the concept of a customer-focused organizational structure that uses groups of customers as the primary basis for structuring the organization. They identify typical organizational transitions as firms move toward a customer-focused organizational structure and discuss the challenges firms face in making this transition. They conclude with implications for academic research, managerial practice, and business school curriculum. Christian Homburg is a professor of business administration and marketing and Chair of the Marketing Department at the University of Mannheim in Germany. He received his Ph.D. and master’s degrees from the University of Karlsruhe and earned his habilitation at the University of Mainz. His research interests include organizational issues in marketing, customer orientation, industrial marketing, and relationship marketing. Dr. Homburg has consulted and delivered executive education programs for more than one hundred companies, including Daimler-Benz, Siemens, Deutsche Bank, Hoechst, RWE, Thyssen, Krupp-Hoesch and Sodexho. John P. Workman, Jr. is an associate professor of marketing at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. Dr. Workman conducts research on the organization and role of marketing within the firm, on new product development in high-tech firms, and more recently on organizational issues for e-commerce initiatives. His research uses concepts from organization theory, strategy, and sociology to examine the interactions between marketing and other groups in the firm. Dr. Workman has a B.S. from N.C. State University, an M.B.A. from the University of Virginia, and a Ph.D. from M.I.T. He has consulted for a number of organizations on the topics of e-commerce and marketing organization. Ove Jensen is a Ph.D. student studying under Professor Homburg at the University of Mannheim. He received his master’s degree from the WHU Koblenz. He conducts research on sales management, organizational issues in marketing, and incentive systems. He has extensive consulting experience in the areas of market-focused management and sales management.