Editorial

Citation

Morgan, R.E. (2006), "Editorial", International Marketing Review, Vol. 23 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/imr.2006.03623caa.001

Editorial

Our first paper is entitled “Service innovation strategy and process: a cross-national comparative analysis”. Alam explores the hitherto neglected area of new service development (NSD) in a cross-national context. An empirical study is reported of the NSD strategy and process of financial service firms in Australia and the USA. From these data, it is observed that firms in both countries use different new service strategies to compete and emphasize different sets of development stages in developing new services. These findings generate a number of implications which are valuable for both managers and future research.

Pla-Barber and Escribá-Esteve consider, “Accelerated internationalisation: evidence from a late investor country” in the second paper. This paper offers evidence of the existence of a group of firms that use an accelerated form of internationalisation process supporting the hypothesis that differences exist between fast and gradual internationalising firms. The authors find that firms adopting a very rapid internationalisation process begin to export at an early stage and devote substantial efforts to the international arena. Moreover, the acceleration process is linked to: a proactive attitude on the part of the managers of the organisation; a strategy based on marketing differentiation; and, a substantial influence of the network of relationships with customers and competitors.

The third paper by Okazaki is entitled, “Excitement or sophistication? A preliminary exploration of online brand personality”. This study attempts to identify the brand personality dimensions of online consumers by using “forms of online communications”. Brand personality stimuli were adopted from prior research on advertising creative strategies and a content analysis was conducted on 270 web sites created by 64 American brands in the USA, UK, France, Germany and Spain. Five dimensions of brand personality stimuli are identified: excitement, sophistication, affection, popularity and competence. The principal forms of online communications are identified as stakeholder relations, direct/indirect sales, choice functions, connectedness, orientation and product positioning. Analyses indicate that there are modest but consistent associations between the intended brand personality dimensions and the forms of online communications.

Consumer ethnocentrism is considered to the belief that it is inappropriate – or even immoral – to purchase foreign products because to do so is damaging to the domestic economy, will increase domestic unemployment, and is generally unpatriotic. In the fourth paper Klein, Ettenson and Krishnan explore whether this concept extends to contexts in which foreign products are preferred to domestic products. In “Extending the construct of consumer ethnocentrism: when foreign products are preferred” these authors evaluate the psychometric properties of the CETSCALE in the transition economies of China and Russia. Their findings demonstrate that the scale can be used effectively in these transitional economies. Further, a valid and reliable six-item version of the CETSCALE is developed based on these samples. The refined six-item scale is then validated through a re-analysis of Netemeyer et al. ’s (1991) data collected in four developed countries. A consistent pattern of support is found for the six-item CETSCALE across eight samples from six countries.

Finally, Craig and Douglas assess a challenging concept in “Beyond national culture: implications of cultural dynamics for consumer research”. They contend that rapid change makes it increasingly imperative to account for the dynamic character of culture and to understand the ways its composition is being transformed by global forces. Based upon this premise the authors explore different perspectives of culture related to the three components of culture – intangibles, material culture and communication. The recent literature dealing with ways in which cultural dynamics are influencing the nature and meaning of culture are explored and a series of substantive and methodological implications of these changing cultural dynamics for international marketing research are discussed.

Robert E. MorganCo-editor