Choice of Market Entry Mode in Emerging Markets

Summary

This study explores the antecedents of market entry strategy in emerging markets and examines the market environmental, transaction-specific, competitive strategic factors and organizational capability that influence the choice of market entry mode. Empirical results based on a survey of Japanese companies support the combined relevance of their factors on choice of market entry mode in an emerging market. Although most of the mode of entry research assumes that the firm has the option to choose any entry mode in a given market, this study examines the impact of the factors in the internationalization process of firms. The results suggest that experiential knowledge has an immense impact on the choice of entry mode in China, an emerging market with high environmental uncertainty, but also high market potential. The empirical findings also show the important influences of risk-absorption capability and risk-dispersion mechanism on the choice of entry mode into the Chinese market.     

Corporate Social Responsibility and Corporate Governance: Role of Context in International Settings

This research aims to explore the relationship between corporate governance and CSR: What are the major factors that play a direct role in the establishment of this relationship? How does context and institutional background impact upon the relationship between CSR and Governance? Using in-depth semi-structured interviews from two types of governance systems in three countries over three years, this study has demonstrated that in practice, within different settings, CSR is being used both as a strategy as well as a reaction to different drivers. We call this adaptive governance where governance can be defined as a flexible system of action incorporating strategic and monitoring activities that determines the way a company enacts its responsibilities to its shareholders and stakeholders and which is determined at any given time by the interrelationship of institutional drivers and behavioural norms. Governance systems and their interrelationships with CSR are demonstrated as fluid according to the national and institutional context, economic situation and industry impact. In the eyes of practitioners corporate governance includes both structural and behavioural factors as well as responsibilities and actions towards shareholders and stakeholders. Contextual factors that this research highlights to be important to the incorporation of CSR into governance include the economic environment, national governance system, regulation and soft law, shareholders, national culture, behavioural norms and industry impacts. Hypotheses on the impact of institutional contexts, industry impacts and economic situations on different types of CSR actions are proposed for further research.     

The impact of emotional appeal and the media context on the effectiveness of commercials for not-for-profit and for-profit brands

This study investigates the impact of emotions, both ad- and context-evoked, on the effectiveness of commercials for not-for-profit vs. for-profit brands. Two types of emotional impact are taken into account: firstly, the emotional appeal of the commercial itself and secondly, the emotion evoked by the context in which the commercial is embedded. Effectiveness is made operational by both rational (recall, recognition) and emotional measures (likeability, understanding of the ad and reduced intention to switch the ad). The main research uses a 2 × 2 between subjects design where the context (warm vs. sad film fragment) and the type of commercial (warm vs. sad) were manipulated for not-for-profit and for-profit brands. The appropriate stimuli were identified in a preliminary study. The results indicate that, overall, sadness as an execution approach works better for commercials. This is in particular the case for the rational impact measures of the for-profit brands. For the not-for-profit brands, the emotional measures have significantly higher scores. Moreover, a context-evoking sadness proves to be the most responsive for the for-profit brands.     

The Impact of Social Marketing on Social Engineering in Economic Restructuring

SUMMARY

Social Marketing is a rapidly growing marketing sub-discipline based on the premise that bringing successful commercial marketing technologies to bear on problems of individual and social welfare can generate positive outcomes. This paper gives an overview of recent developments in Social Marketing in a global context and discusses the relationship of these developments to those in commercial, not-for-profit or third sector and public sector marketing, and public relations. The paper then relates the global context back to developments in Australasian and Asian nations, with particular reference to social engineering during economic restructuring.     

A Typology for Hospitality Franchise Systems

Abstract

In spite of the high level of independence that exists in a franchise system, franchisees and franchisers are extensively dependent on each other. Because of this greater interdependence that exists in the system, financial success of one depends on the financial performance of the other. Therefore, any strategic choices made by a franchisee must always include the financial performance of the franchiser. A strategic typology based on the financial performance of franchisees and franchisers is presented in this paper. Potential strategic choices to the franchisees in different given financial performance scenarios are discussed. It is a conceptual paper offering a model and suggestions for future research on strategic management in franchising.     

Uncertainty,Generic Strategy,Strategic Clarity,and Performance of Retail SMEs in Peru,Argentina, and the United States

This study examines the links among perceived environmental uncertainty, generic strategy, strategic clarity, and performance in small and medium‐sized enterprises in the retail industry in Argentina, Peru, and the United States. Moderate support was found for links between the defender strategy and competitive uncertainty, the prospector strategy and technology uncertainty, and the analyzer strategy and market uncertainty. In all three nations, businesses with high and low strategic clarity—the extent to which a single generic strategy reflects the organization's strategic intent—outperformed those with moderate strategic clarity. Differences across nations are addressed, and future research opportunities are elaborated.     

Servbrand Framework: A Business-To-Business Services Brand Equity Framework

ABSTRACT

Purpose: The research reported on here set out to develop a tailored branding model for business to business (B-to-B) services by applying the brand resonance pyramid to a selected B-to-B services context.

The brand resonance pyramid was developed based on research that was predominantly consumer product or individual brand oriented, though one of the objectives when the model was developed was that “the model had to be versatile and applicable to all possible kinds of brands and industry settings. As more diverse applications of branding continued to emerge for products, services, organizations, people, places, and so forth, the model needed to have far-ranging relevance”. The brand resonance pyramid therefore had to be applicable to any context, including B-to-B services contexts. However, consumer goods branding strategies are not directly transferable to B-to-B or services markets and there are documented differences between the B-to-B and business-to-consumer (B2C) markets and products and services contexts. There is also doubt regarding the validity of the contention that the brand resonance pyramid should be applicable to the B-to-B sector.

Methodology: Using an interpretivist qualitative research approach and an exploratory research strategy, the Servbrand framework was developed empirically by applying the brand resonance pyramid to a selected B-to-B services context. Fourteen useful in-depth interviews were obtained from appropriate and information rich participants that represented more than 14 of the 89 organization that were included in the selection frame. Some of the participants were responsible for the relevant decisions of more than one organization.

Findings: The results from the study reported on here (summarized as Figure 5) prompted the inclusion of a people dimension and elevated the importance of relationships in an amended B-to-B services brand equity framework. The people brand-building block includes the dimensions of attitude and demeanor, personality and values, personableness, product knowledge and client knowledge. Relationships, as the ultimate aim of the framework, concern both interpersonal relationships and partnerships.

The article presents a conceptual framework to guide effective brand building strategies in a selected B-to-B services context. Researchers can use the framework to test its applicability in other contexts, which will contribute to the amendment of a significant brand equity management framework.

The Servbrand framework can assist marketing practitioners to improve the effectiveness of strategic brand management for B-to-B services.

Contribution: The empirical research contributes to three areas of brand equity research, namely: 1) the offering type – by investigating service offerings rather than product offerings; 2) the brand level – by investigating organization-level brands rather than product-level brands; and 3) context – by investigating a B-to-B context rather than a B2C context. A revised brand resonance pyramid is proposed and called the Servbrand framework.     

Competition and competitive groupings: An exploratory study in information technology markets

The focus of the research is upon the means by which firms can both create and sustain a competitive advantage. The paper addresses the relationship between shifting patterns of competitive rivalry and the emerging structure of a volatile, but growing branch of the Information Technology Industry. The concept and existence of competitive groups of firms is explored from three perspectives: those of the research analyst, the competitive suppliers and the customers of the service. The first perspective draws upon and applies previous work in the field of strategic groups, mobility barriers and company competences; the second perspective is operational, based upon the perception of the competitive environment by practising managers; the final perspective draws upon field research into customer organisation rooted in the notion that differentiation by suppliers will only be manifest in competitive advantage when it matches customers needs.

Different patterns of competition are identified and strategic management choices are highlighted in a product market undergoing turbulent development with the onset of telecommunication networks for the transmission of computerised data bases.     

Transforming under deep uncertainty: A strategic perspective on risk management

Companies increasingly face the need for transformation in today’s rapidly changing business environment, characterized by major shifts in technology, regulation, and customer behavior. A lack of strategic risk insight and foresight leaves many incumbents insufficiently prepared in the face of such deep uncertainty. We argue that traditional risk management falls short because it predominantly focuses on strategy execution while leaving strategy formulation largely untouched. Moreover, an administrative-heavy risk management process can create strategic inertia and a misleading sense of control. In today’s dynamic business context, companies must not only increase the speed and impact of their strategy execution but also continuously explore the development of new strategies in response to disruptive events or emerging opportunities. Our research shows how leading companies develop a strategic risk management (SRM) capability to increase their resilience and agility in response to deep uncertainty. SRM takes a strategic, forward-looking perspective and focuses on strengthening processes, people, and practices for purposefully integrating risk into the strategy formulation process. This article offers a framework with three proven configurations of content and timing integration, risk management roles, and leading practices that enable effective SRM.     

Antecedents and temporal dynamics of strategic divergence in multinational corporations: Evidence from Europe

Coordinating consistent strategy implementation has been identified a key challenge for multi-national corporations. Based on intraorganizational evolutionary models of strategy formation, this paper thus empirically investigates the antecedents and temporal dynamics of strategic divergence. Strategic divergence is the deviation of a firm's resource allocation decisions with its articulated concept of corporate strategy. Large-scale empirical analysis of 11,406 resource allocation decisions of twenty-five publicly listed, multi-national and multi-business European firms indicates that decision type, operational and divisional manager involvement in decision making and structural context changes exert a significant influence on strategic divergence. Importantly, results further suggest that firms’ levels of strategic divergence tend to increase over time and that the antecedents of strategic divergence have a differential impact as time passes.     

A Strategic Approach to Enhance Management and Marketing Effectiveness: Utilizing the SOAR Leadership Model to Improve Communication for Public Sector and Not-for-Profit Organizations

ABSTRACT

The effective implementation of the SOAR Strategic Leadership Model in not-for-profits and public sector organizations is explored, with a focus on both marketing implications and improvement of intra-organizational communications. The SOAR Model is especially valuable in such organizations, as leaders in this business structure are progressing from a production orientation to a marketing orientation because of changes in the marketplace.

1. Strategic goals, coupled with a strong vision, are essential to growth and success of an organization. The vision must be strong enough to remain valuable and usable even through changes of organization leadership and serve as a guide through changes in life cycle and strategic modes.

2. Marketing programs must be developed to communicate the strategic focus to target market publics and to associates of the organization. “Buying in” to the vision will enhance employees' motivation and ability to grow the organization both profitably and effectively. Further, potential customers want to do business with organizations that clearly and definitely display a clear-cut focus of consumer need satisfaction.

3. Feedback both to and from all levels of the organization is requisite for successful implementation of varied strategies. Thus, strategic leadership requires that the leader use different styles to manage effectively under varying circumstances.

4. Specific emphasis is given to the unique situations encountered with delivery of services, focusing upon the not-for-profit and public sector provider. As leaders surface, many often discover themselves with an organization that is ill equipped to follow, and thus to know how to follow, when to follow and the roles each should and can play.

Recommendations are offered on how organizations can use strategic leadership and the SOAR Strategic Leadership Model to excel in managing the organization as it develops and matures.     

An Investigation on Incentive Strategies in Community Building in Business-to-Business Electronic Markets

ABSTRACT

Purpose: Community building is recognized as an important governance mechanism in business-to-business (B-to-B) electronic markets by enhancing firms’ participation in these platform markets. However, little research has been done regarding the role of incentive strategies in community building. The main purpose of this paper is to understand how to motivate merchants to participate in a merchant community with incentive strategies.

Methodology: Data were collected in a community of a large B-to-B electronic platform market in China. We randomly chose a sample of 605 participants from among all merchant firms registered in this community, and track their behaviors for 2 weeks. Their behaviors are recorded based on our research design.

Findings: With the empirical analysis from a community of a large B-to-B electronic platform market in China, our results show that (1) both platform and peer incentive strategies can significantly enhance community participation, while platform incentives is more effective in general; (2) platform incentive strategy is a more effective strategy as seller firm uncertainty increases; (3) peer incentive strategy is a more effective strategy as buyer firm uncertainty increases.

Originality: This paper is among the first to investigate two types of incentive strategies in community building, platform level and peer level. We also investigate the moderating role of market uncertainties due to market participants from seller and buyer when examining the effectiveness of these two incentive strategies.     

Dealing With Uncertainties When Governing CSR Policies

As corporate social responsibility involves a voluntary business endeavour to address social and environmental issues beyond legal compliance, governments cannot fall back on hierarchical command-and-control policies to support it. As such, it is complementary with the increasing popularity of public policies known as New Governance policies, where the government is engaged in a horizontal inter-organizational network of societal actors and where public policy is both formed and executed by the interacting and voluntary efforts from a multitude of stakeholders. However, such policies are known to generate substantive uncertainty about the content of CSR and its related issues, strategic uncertainty regarding the behavior of the actors involved and institutional uncertainty related to the interaction process involved in the institutional change. We explore New Governance policy instruments to address these uncertainties in the context CSR and discuss the experiences with these methods in the European Union. Jan Lepoutre is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Economics at Ghent University, Belgium. In his dissertation, he focuses on the competences associated with small business social responsibility and networks as governmental means to build competences among small businesses. Nikolay A. Dentchev is an independent research fellow at Ghent University, Belgium, and a project coordinator at the corporate venturing department of Fortis Group (Fortis Venturing). He holds a Ph.D. in business economics from Ghent University. His current research is related to entrepreneurship, instrumental stakeholder theory, and management challenges of corporate social responsibility. Aimé Heene is a professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration at Ghent University, Belgium. He teaches strategic management for private and public organizations and currently focuses his research on (competencebased) management in public and social profit organizations.     

The supply-side of environmental sustainability and export performance: The role of knowledge integration and international buyer involvement

Most of previous studies seek to understand buyer perspectives in green supply chain relationships and devote inadequate attention to the strategic role of upstream suppliers. Drawing on a market-oriented approach to sustainability, this paper examines the enabling factors and processes that underpin how export suppliers from emerging economies leverage their strategic intent to develop knowledge integration capacity for achieving improved export performance. The results from a sample of Chinese exporters show that the relational capacity of knowledge integration mediates the performance impact of market-oriented environmental sustainability, and such a mediating process of leaning is further enhanced by international buyer involvement. We reveal that relationship efforts should be directed at developing integrative capacity involving key partners for implementing proactive environmental strategy in international business-to-business (B2B) markets. This study contributes to the research of supply chain sustainability in a global context.     

Strategic and organisational determinants of sophistication in deployed sales force automation systems within three industry sectors in the UK

Abstract

This paper investigates strategic and organisational context determinants of the sophistication of adopted sales force automation (SFA) systems in three UK industries: financial services, pharmaceuticals, and building/construction. Sophistication of adopted systems is associated with the organisation placing greater emphasis on information orientation, which is itself driven by an increased integration of IT and sales coupled with increased organisational slack. Increased integration of IT and sales is itself driven by increased strategic importance of sales coupled with increased use of internal communication networks. Importantly, a firm's marketing orientation, although also driven by the strategic importance of sales, has no impact on either information orientation or SFA sophistication. We discuss the implications of our findings to aid understanding of SFA implementation failure.     

Improvement of Operational Performance of Internationalized Companies through Collaboration in Distribution Networks

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to provide theoretical insights on the impact of supply chain collaboration on the operational performance of firms and collaborative advantage as an intermediate variable in the context of the supply networks of internationalized firms. The research is based on a case study of a distribution network constituting Russian and international firms. The obtained results indicate that supply chain collaboration improves operational performance of internationalized firms and firms in domestic market. Moreover, the study advocates that collaboration in distribution networks can be considered as driving factor for international firms to enter the emerging markets through supply networks.     

The Role of Innovation Policies in the Brazilian Health Biotechnology Regime

ABSTRACT

The Brazilian biotechnology health innovation regime can be understood as a phenomenon that results from the co-evolution of scientific, economic, and political factors. In order to analyze this co-evolution process, this article presents empirical evidence regarding the relationship between the public policy rationale devoted to promoting innovation activities and the development of health biotechnology in Brazil. Focusing on the 2002–2010 period, this article analyzes the different roles played by public policy on the development of Brazilian health biotechnology. The article is based on the analysis of two main dimensions: the national research capabilities and the dedicated biotechnology firms in Brazil. In this regard, the main conclusion is that public policies had a significant impact on both dimensions. However, the impact has been erratic and reflects strategic public policy weaknesses.     

Technological capabilities and the decision to outsource/outsource offshore R&D services

We analyze firm and environmental factors influencing the decision to outsource and outsource offshore R&D services. To do so, we have adopted a co-evolutionary approach adapted to firm internationalization, according to which these decisions are conditioned by the institutional environment (the IPR system), managerial intentionality (firms’ international strategy) and organizational path dependence and learning (firms’ technological and governance capabilities). Specifically, we argue that: (1) firms with more technological capabilities will tend to both outsource and outsource offshore R&D services, (2) the positive effect of technological capabilities would be leveraged when the institutional context of the firms’ country of origin has allowed them to transform their technological expertise into governance capabilities, and (3) that those firms with a higher local responsiveness attitude will be more likely to outsource offshore R&D services. We have found support for our hypotheses using survey data from a sample of 182 technology intensive firms from the European Union and the US.     

Social Marketing of a Fortified Staple Food at Scale: Generating Demand for Fortified Rice in Brazil

ABSTRACT

This paper describes the social marketing strategy implemented by PATH and GAIN to create a sustainable market for rice fortification in Brazil and develop a replicable model relevant to other geographies. It draws on market research on consumer attitudes and practices, as well as key demand and consumer metrics before and after execution of the social marketing campaign in Brazil. This marketing endeavor succeeded in establishing the viability of introducing fortified rice in a country through a purely market-based approach. Whereas social marketing is vital to the introduction and scale-up of fortified staple foods through commercial markets, it is not sufficient to achieve meaningful scale and sustainability. Engagement from the public and social sectors, clear governance, and other factors are critical to substantial and long-term impact. Lessons from this first attempt to introduce a fortified staple food through a market-based approach are relevant to similar initiatives elsewhere.     

Strategic and Marketing Implications of Consumer Behaviour in Financial Services

As competitive liberalisation and the application of technology in the creation and distribution of financial services have increased consumer choice in the UK personal financial service industry, so consumer choice in the UK personal financial services industry, so consumer behaviour has assumed a greater role in determining the strategic environment in which financial service providers operate. This paper explores the reltionship between consumer behaviour and the strategic choices facing financial consumer behaviour and the strategic choices facing financial service firms by developing a framework of consumer behaviour and linking the forms of behaviour and type of financial service instrument that determines the strategic environment within which financial service providers operate. Based on that interaction the paper develops a contingency view of financial services strategy and argues that to be successful, financial service providers will need to move away from broad service provision and adopt more focused strategies that reflect far more closely the strategic environment in which they operate.