Editorial
Article Type: Editorial From: International Marketing Review, Volume 27, Issue 5
This issue presents papers which address a range of fundamental issues in international marketing: the importance of written language as a primary vehicle of international marketing communication, international supplier-distributor relationships, international brand consistency, and international advertising,together with an analysis of the contribution made to the field by mainstream marketing journals.
Leonidas Leonidou, Bradley Barnes, Stavroula Spyropoulou, and Constantine Katsikeas “Assessing the contribution of leading mainstream marketing journals to the international marketing discipline” presents the view that,despite the importance of international marketing, mainstream marketing journals have devoted far less attention to this field than they have to domestic marketing. A total of 508 international marketing-focused articles were identified from the top ten mainstream marketing journals during the period 1975-2004 and each article content-analyzed in terms of six major aspects:article nature, authorship characteristics, research design, scope of research,research methodology, and thematic areas. Among their findings, they comment that, although there was an increase in the number of articles with an international focus over time, in most journals their share was limited, most were of an empirical nature and were mainly written by multiple authors, in most cases based in the USA. The paper assists in evaluating the methodological content of these international marketing-related articles and in establishing trends regarding the evolution of the international marketing field from the standpoint of leading mainstream journals.
“How global brands travel with consumers: an examination of the relationship between brand consistency and meaning across national boundaries”by Anders Bengtsson, Fleura Bardhi, and Meera Venkatraman challenge the view in the brand management literature that argues that the standardization of branding strategy across global markets leads to consistent and well-defined brand meaning. Taking a qualitative approach, the authors empirically examine whether and how two prototypical global brands travel with consumers. They study how consumers create brand meanings at home and abroad as well as the impact of context (e.g. place) on the meaning of global brands for the same consumer. The findings demonstrate that despite perceived standardized global brand platforms,consumers develop divergent brand meanings abroad. While at home, global brands have come to symbolize corporate excess, predatory intentions, and cultural homogenizations; abroad they evoke meanings of comfort, predictability, safety,and national pride. The cultural context (e.g. place) impacts consumer-derived brand meanings even among the same group of consumers, while the standardization offered by global brands provides an important symbolic value to mobile consumers of serving as an anchor to the home left behind.
Janice Payan, Göran Svensson, Gabriel Awuah, Svante Andersson, and Joe Hair develop “a cross-cultural RELQUAL-scale in supplier-distributor relationships in Sweden and USA.” The study provides support for the dimensional distinctiveness of cooperation, coordination, specific assets,satisfaction, trust, and commitment, with four of the dimensions reflective of relationship quality or the “Cross-cultural RELQUAL-scale”(cooperation, coordination, trust, and commitment). A test of metric invariance confirmed the RELQUAL-scale is appropriate for cross-cultural research. Such a scale is of interest to business practice as it provides a structure of dimensions to be considered in maintaining satisfactory levels of relationship quality with suppliers in the international context.
Christian Dianoux and Zdenek Linhart attempt to gain a better understanding of the reasons advertisers use nudity in European advertising campaigns and,more precisely, whether a print ad that uses nudity is more or less effective than an ad without nudity in the Czech Republic, Spain, and France. Using an experimental approach, they find that nationality does not appear to influence preferences for advertisements with or without nudity. Although differences emerge among the three countries in attitudes toward the ad (Aad), they are independent of the ad type and consistently reflect the same trends within each country. Gender influences Aad, with women adopting a more negative Aad when they see nudity compared with when they do not, in contrast with men, regardless of their country. The authors conclude that advertisers considering the use of nudity in their advertising campaigns should take great care to define their target market by gender, rather than in terms of the European country in which the advertising will appear.
Finally, Monica D. Hernandez and Michael Minor S. review East-West writing system (cross-script) differences and summarize previous work examining the cross-script effect on consumer responses. They argue that, despite the pervasive nature and importance of written language, scant research has addressed differences between East/West consumer responses attributable to native script processing. They go on to describe the implications for international marketing and cross-cultural studies and propose specific questions for future research in areas relying heavily on written communication,such as international marketing communications, internet marketing,international branding, and cross-cultural consumer research. The manuscript is among the first to point out the insufficiency of scholarly studies on written language effects on consumer responses and raises international marketers’awareness of differences in East-West written language processing so that they may more effectively target consumers.
Once again, we are sure you will find these papers interesting, relevant, and stimulating, and we look forward to the continued growth of International Marketing Review(IMR)’s significance and influence in the field of international marketing. On that note, we are pleased to report than IMR has retained an impact factor of 1.164 in the most recent ISI listings, as well as achieving a score of 0.86 for the latest part-year figures (2009) in the recently published SCOPUS citation statistics. Created by Professor Henk Moed at CTWS, University of Leiden, Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP; www.journalindicators.com)measures contextual citation impact by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field. The impact of a single citation is given higher value in subject areas where citations are less likely, and vice versa. It is very pleasing to see that IMR is holding its own in these new rankings.
Jeryl Whitelock
