Guest editorial

Citation

Fastoso, F. and Whitelock, J. (2012), "Guest editorial", International Marketing Review, Vol. 29 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/imr.2012.03629caa.001

Guest editorial

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: International Marketing Review, Volume 29, Issue 3.

Welcome to this special issue of International Marketing Review (IMR) on “International marketing theory, strategy and implementation: insights from Latin America”. We are very pleased to be able to present five papers based on empirical data gathered in Latin America, a region of the world largely neglected by international marketing and business research.

Before focusing on the papers in more detail, we would like to say a word or two about the background and importance of the topic of this special issue as well as to present some recommendations aimed at encouraging authors to conduct more international marketing research in Latin America.

The background of this special issue

The idea for this special issue arose from the fact that while the body of research on international marketing focused on emerging markets is growing, the attention paid to the Latin American context so far has been very limited (Samiee and Athanassiou, 1998; Birnik and Bowman, 2007; Okazaki and Mueller, 2007; Fastoso and Whitelock, 2010). We drew particular attention to this in our recent viewpoint piece in IMR (Fastoso and Whitelock, 2011). While some attention has been paid to the region in the more general area of management – as shown by, for example, the Strategic Management in Latin America conferences and the special issues deriving from them published by the Journal of Business Research (e.g. Vol. 63 No. 7) – none has been specifically paid to research in international marketing. Such neglect appears surprising given the economic importance of a region with a population of over 550 million and a GDP of approximately 4 trillion USD.

As a result, our aim with this special issue was to encourage authors both to conduct research in Latin America and to target high-quality journals with the outcomes of that research. We believe this encouragement was essential given the findings of our study on the reasons for the dearth of published marketing research focused on Latin America (Fastoso and Whitelock, 2011). Using a Delphi study of authors who have succeeded in publishing marketing research from Latin America in high-quality international journals, we discovered the existence of substantial barriers to achieving that goal. These barriers affected first the conduct of research and included issues such as lack of research networks and the tendency for response rates in surveys to be extremely low. Additional barriers, however, were perceived as deriving from the editorial review process and included biases among editors and reviewers against research conducted in Latin America, the lack of robust enough theoretical conceptualizations, and difficulties with the English academic language style.

We received 25 submissions in all, five of which finally made it through the review process into this special issue. We were encouraged to see that international marketing research is indeed being conducted in Latin America which, given the right opportunity, can succeed in being published in a high-quality academic journal. We were particularly pleased to see that three of the five papers in this special issue are authored or co-authored by academics working for Latin American institutions.

Observations from the Editors’ desk for authors of future papers based on research in Latin America

We now offer some general comments relating to our experience of editing this special issue which, coupled with the findings of our earlier work (Fastoso and Whitelock, 2011), we believe may be beneficial to authors interested in conducting research in Latin America. The comments that we present below apply mainly to Latin American academics working at Latin American institutions. However, they are also likely to apply to any academic who is a non-native speaker of English and/or who received academic training outside the Anglo-Saxon tradition.

Papers which did not make it through the review process for this special issue shared one or more of three specific elements: problems with the literature within which their studies were positioned, issues with the theoretical underpinning of their work and problems with language style.

Several papers failed to make it through the review process because, while focused on a topic of potential interest to IMR readers, these papers failed to establish a strong enough position within our existing knowledge of international marketing, as demonstrated by the most highly relevant literature for a journal of this kind. This is to say that, although these papers were based on a body of literature, the contribution of the papers to our understanding of international marketing, as published in the top-ranked Anglo-Saxon journals that reviewers and readers of the IMR would expect to see and would be familiar with was not clear. This should not be seen as a bias in the review process, but is rather a reiteration of the need to be aware of the reality of the research process, where top “international” journals have developed from a particular research tradition. Potential authors need, therefore, to carefully consider who their targets are (i.e. the journal, the reviewers, the editors) and position and present their work accordingly.

A second recurring issue in reviewer comments on less strong papers related to the lack of theoretical contribution. In other words, reviewers commented that while some papers looked at issues, which had not been looked at before, they failed to make clear how studying those issues contributed to knowledge or theory in the field. Theory is a contested issue in the field of marketing (see, e.g. Sutton and Staw, 1995; Crittenden and Peterson, 2011), yet it is imperative for authors interested in publishing their work in a high-quality international marketing journal to show how this work contributes to extant knowledge about a specific topic. Justifying a study along the lines that nobody has ever looked at that issue in that particular context is, in itself, insufficient.

A third and final issue which authors need to pay special attention to is language and communication in a manuscript. This does not relate only to language quality, which was in most cases good enough to make the paper intelligible, but to style. The Spanish way of writing and expressing oneself – native to many of the authors of the submitted papers – is radically different from the style expected in an “international” top-ranked journal, which has developed out of the Anglo-Saxon academic tradition. The former is “flowery” and stands out by virtue of being beautiful to read whereas the latter focuses on the message to be put across and sees any addition to that as unhelpful or even confusing. It is therefore imperative for authors who are not familiar with academic English writing to make sure that their manuscripts are checked by someone who is. Of course, it is important to note that language issues never, on their own, caused a paper not to make it through the review process but rather were of concern in combination with one or both of the other two issues discussed.

The five papers included in this special issue

The paper by Da Rocha and colleagues, titled “The international commitment of late-internationalizing Brazilian entrepreneurial firms”, contributes to our understanding of internationalization and particularly of the international commitment of entrepreneurial firms from an emerging economy to their foreign operations. Combining the different research streams that have studied international commitment, it uses the resource-based view to explore the interplay between resource allocation and commitment in the foreign investments of small entrepreneurial firms in Brazil. Its findings show that among the factors influencing international commitment, the interplay between resource availability, goal congruence, entrepreneur's desire to internationalize and family attitude towards internationalization seem to have a combined impact on the arousal and initial development of international commitment of small established entrepreneurial firms. The findings of this study can be useful to emerging market firms by pointing out the potential negative impact of low international commitment on a firm's internationalization process. Since most firms from emerging markets cannot count on previous internationalization knowledge accumulated by other firms in their (domestic) institutional environment to be used as guides to international expansion, this type of research can provide some guidelines to help their internationalization efforts.

The next paper, by Bianchi and Andrews, is titled “Risk, trust, and consumer online purchasing behaviour: a Chilean perspective” and investigates Chilean consumers online purchase behaviour with a specific focus on the influence of perceived risk and trust. In doing so, it contributes to an area of international marketing in which most empirical cross-national studies compare the USA and Asian countries. This study addresses calls to investigate consumers’ post-adoption acceptance of a technology to gain insights into which factors are most influential in explaining continuance behaviour. The study finds that perceived risk online had an inverse relationship with consumers’ attitude and that attitude has a positive influence on intentions to continue purchasing. The findings of this study show that consumers in a Latin American country, recognized as a collectivist, high-risk avoidance culture, are willing to continue making purchases online despite the risks involved.

Manzur and colleagues present a study titled “Comparative advertising effectiveness in Latin America: evidence from Chile”. The study focuses on an area of enquiry in international advertising, comparative advertising, which is receiving more and more attention as countries outside of the USA – such as those of the EU – start to allow the use of this type of advertisements. This study therefore explores the viability of different forms of comparative advertising in Chile, a country in a region which had so far remained unstudied in this area. Its findings suggest that, in contrast to what previous research suggests, both direct and indirect comparative advertisements are not more effective than non-comparative ads in Chile, a fact that the authors attribute to cultural biases and the novelty of comparative advertising in Latin America. On the whole, these findings are consistent with the idea that the benefits of comparative advertising for consumers outside the USA are uncertain, hence contributing to our understanding of international advertising.

In the fourth paper, Marquina and Morales present an empirical study that offers findings about the magnitude and type of impact of corporate social initiatives on consumers purchasing behaviour through a study carried out using student samples from two business schools: CENTRUM Catolica in Peru and EADA in Spain. The study used a discrete choice modelling experiment and a binary logit model, with the objective of both quantifying the intention to purchase and establishing how much consumers are willing to pay for specific social features. The results provide empirical validation of the positive relationship between corporate social responsibility and consumer behaviour. However, they also show that the effects of corporate abilities as a whole are stronger than those of corporate social responsibility among the consumers of both countries. The study is exploratory in nature, and offers interesting insights through comparing the impact of CSR in consumers’ purchasing behaviour in a developed country, Spain and a developing country, Peru.

The final paper by Fastoso and Whitelock was not considered by the Guest Editors of this special issue. Journal Editor, Professor John Cadogan, who handled the submission process in this case, writes:

This paper addresses the neglected issue of the implementation of international advertising strategies. It firstly introduces a framework of four options that multinational enterprises (MNEs) can use to implement such strategies. Subsequently, drawing on contingency theory, it develops hypotheses relating to how environmental factors and company characteristics affect such implementation. The study then tests its hypotheses on a sample of respondents through a web-survey targeted at MNE subsidiary managers working in the countries comprising the Mercosur trading bloc (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay). The findings of the study show that the choice of implementation process option is contingent on the environmental factor cultural homogeneity and the company characteristics subsidiary size and MNE country-of-origin. However, regional economic integration does not appear to play a part.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all our contributors for sharing their work with us. We are also particularly grateful, as always, to all our reviewers, both editorial board members and others, for their advice and guidance throughout the review process for this special issue.

Fernando Fastoso and Jeryl Whitelock