Research in emerging markets: advances in product and brand management

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Product & Brand Management, Volume 22, Issue 1

The term of emerging market economy (EME) was first coined in 1981 by Antoine W. Van Agtmael of the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank. An EME may be defined as an economy with low to medium per capita income. Such countries constitute approximately 80 per cent of the global population, and account for 20 per cent of the world economy, which is projected to grow up to 50 per cent in the coming 25 years. With growing influence of the EMEs in the world economic scenario, a historic shift is indeed taking place today in global marketplace. The EMEs constitute several countries in Asia, Latin America,Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Of these, Brazil,Russia, India, and China (referred collectively as BRIC) are among the most influential emerging economy countries. Once viewed as “less developed countries”, the EMEs now offer a significant growth opportunity for multinational corporations (Khanna et al., 2005). The EMEs have brought about a metamorphic change in the world trade, commerce, markets, and the balance of power (Sheth, 2011). Their collective share of total merchandise exports is over 40 per cent now (Dash et al., 2012). Over 70 Fortune500 firms are from EMEs. Interestingly, despite the recent global financial crisis, the expansion rate of EME-MNCs is not abating. In nutshell, the future belongs to those marketers who successfully develop and effectively implement their marketing plans in the EMEs.

Marketing scholars have historically conducted extensive researches in the highly developed economies. As EMEs radically differ from the mature developed market economies, they pose new strategic questions that traditional marketing frameworks do not answer (Khanna et al., 2005; Johnson and Tellis,2008). There is general agreement now that all our established marketing theories and empirical generalizations will not be applicable in the EMEs context (Burgess and Steenkamp, 2006; Eyring et al., 2011). The EMEs present significant socio-economic, demographic, cultural and regulative departures from the marketing theories and practices that are essentially developed in the developed economies for their consumption (Arnold and Quelch,1998). There is an increased realization worldwide by marketing practitioners and academicians that the concepts and frameworks based on empirical findings of developed economies, grounded in their socio-economic environmental contexts,need to be empirically validated in the EMEs context (Akbar and Samii, 2005;Burgess and Steenkamp, 2006; Fan, 2008; Khanna et al., 2005; Sheth,2011).

Although the researchers of product and brand management initially focused on the world’s most advanced economies, I do firmly believe that it is vital for the future of marketing discipline to conduct more focused research on EMEs. Given the importance of EMEs, several marketing scholars and practitioners have also repeatedly urged to study the marketing issues specific to the context of EMEs (Atsmon et al., 2011; Arnold and Quelch, 1998; Black and Morrison,2010; Burgess and Steenkamp, 2006; Clarke and Flaherty, 2003; Eyring et al.,2011; Khanna, 2009; Sheth, 2011). A growing body of research is now, however,beginning to shed some light on these issues (Cruz et al., 2010;Essoussi and Merunka, 2007; Fu et al., 2009; Iyer et al.,2006; Johnson and Tellis, 2008; Kim et al., 2011; Lorentz and Ghauri,2010; Paswan et al., 2010; Prater et al., 2009; Walters and Samiee, 2003; Yu, 2006)

In order to address the research gap further, the Indian Institute of Management Lucknow (India) held an international conference. The broad objectives of this conference were:

• to identify the most significant trends in the research done so far by the marketing scholars on EMEs; and

• to explore and indicate possible paths to the researchers in marketing for furthering future research in the context of EMEs.

It is expected that this noble endeavor will enable both researchers and practitioners to understand more systematically the dynamics of marketing theory and practice as applied to product and brand management in the context of EMEs.

This special issue of Journal of Product & Brand Management carries five best papers that were identified from a total of 29 initial submissions(made to the January 12-14, 2012 IIM Lucknow International Conference in Marketing) through a two-stage rigorous review process. The first paper titled“Exploring branding strategies of FMCG, services and durables brands:evidence from India”, authored by Bikram Jit Singh Mann and Mandeep Kaur,attempts to analyze and compare the branding strategies used by firms in three sectors namely FMCG, services and durables. The paper offers significant insights for designing branding strategies while branding a product/service in the EMEs context.

The second paper titled “Investigating the role of firm resources and environmental variables in new product commercialization”, authored by K.B Saji and Shashi Shekhar Mishra, attempts to explain the role of firm resources and environmental variables for pursuing new product commercialization in high-tech markets. The empirical study carried out by the authors from the Indian context highlights the most important environmental variables in high-tech markets that act as antecedents to a firm’s technology acquisition intent and the effect of technology acquisition intent on new product commercialization. This paper reports the significant outcomes of an important study on product management that attempted to establish the linkages across environmental variables, firm resources, and firm’s technology strategy in pursuing the new product commercialization.

The third paper titled “Discerning product benefits through visual thematic analysis” by Abhilash Ponnam and Jagrook Dawra attempts to formulate a scientific procedure for discerning the benefits that consumers seek from a product. The authors term this procedure as visual thematic analysis(VTA). The paper illustrates the VTA procedure through discerning the benefits of mainstream (non-financial) English newspapers available in India. The generic applications of VTA procedure mentioned in the paper include data reduction when researcher confronts small sample size, data reduction of categorical variables,and scale development.

The fourth paper titled “Role of content strategy in social media brand communities: a case of Higher Education Institutes in India", authored by Kalpana Chauhan and Anandan Pillai, tries to explore the role of content strategy followed by leading higher education institutes in India, which have created brand community on social media web sites to initiate and enhance customer engagement. The impact of content strategy variables such as content type, posting agility, posting day and content context on number of likes and number of comments, which were manifest variables for customer engagement, is assessed here. The authors assert that, with the application of their study results, an organization would be able to avoid misuse of its social media marketing efforts, and would be able to focus on its content strategy that maximizes customer engagement on its brand community.

The fifth and final paper of this special issue titled “Moderating roles of organizational inertia and project duration in the NPD process: an empirical investigation” by Shashi Shekhar Mishra and K.B. Saji attempts to empirically validate the moderating roles of organizational inertia and project duration in the new high-tech product development process. The study is one among those rare empirical investigations that explained the role of organizational variables in the new high-tech product development process. The findings of the study suggest that segmenting technology market based on firm size may not be an appropriate marketing strategy; instead organizational factors, namely. organizational learning and absorptive capacity, should be taken as the basis of high-tech market segmentation.

It is earnestly hoped that this special issue would throw some light on some of the most important issues concerning the EME specific research on product and brand management, and would help set an agenda for shaping the future of research in product and brand management in the context of EMEs.

K.B.Saji

Acknowledgements

The Guest Editor would like to make use of this opportunity to sincerely thank all those six reviewers, Dr Anand Kumar Jaiswal (Assistant Professor of Marketing, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad), Dr C. Ganesh (Professor of Management & Marketing, University of Kerala), Dr Chengter Ted Ho(Associate Professor of Industrial Management, National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences, Taiwan), Dr Joshy Joseph (Assistant Professor of Marketing,Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode), Dr Kriti Bardhan Gupta (Associate Professor of Agri-business & Marketing, Indian Institute of Management,Lucknow), and Dr V. Mukunda Das (Ex. Professor of Marketing, Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode), who have helped with their high quality reviews on the assigned manuscripts to make this special issue of Journal of Product & Brand Management happen.