Editorial

Citation

Crosier, K. (2006), "Editorial", Marketing Intelligence & Planning, Vol. 24 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/mip.2006.02024eaa.001

Editorial

This issue, number five of the current volume, accompanies number four (though they will not appear simultaneously on line). The partner on the tandem was the first “themed issue” in our history, as distinct from formal special issues with guest editors. Six of the seven articles dealt in some respect with marketing to, within and from China, that giant in the developing world.

I have chosen to include here two more papers on that same theme, and one that focuses on China's developed neighbour, Japan. Those were among 11 that the editorial team had considered for the themed issue, but had been received too late to be blind reviewed in time or had been asked to consider modifications that the authors could not have accomplished before the deadline. Since then, revised versions have satisfied us that they do deserve to join the other six, for their perspectives are interestingly different from those and from one another.

But, first, Viewpoint has made its promised reappearance.

Malcolm McDonald has been well known to marketing people in the UK for three decades. Now a retired Emeritus Professor, he has pursued his career at Cranfield School of Management, one of the first and always one of the foremost British business schools. A member of the Senate of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, author of Marketing Plans: How to Prepare Them, How to Use Them, into its fifth edition, and of 38 other books, keynote speaker at too many seminars and conferences around the world to keep count of: a bona fide guru.

In the first few paragraphs of “How to get marketing back in the boardroom” he regales us with “existential malpractice” “etherised discipline” “soteriological comment” “eschatological academics” and “pathology of business planning failures” which should get your juices going. But all that is largely tongue-in-cheek. The entirely serious argument that follows is that the marketing discipline, having won credibility in the boardroom only 50 years ago, has since lost it entirely through the short-sightedness of marketing managers ... and the academics who advise them. We are generally satisfied to measure effectiveness in terms of what are in fact no more than predisposing factors or enabling conditions – awareness, attitudes, trial – rather than to be held accountable for the creation or destruction of shareholder value. And that, McDonald argues, is the real job of marketing. Only metrics that are truly capable of measuring its achievement can put marketing back where it belongs: in the boardroom.

Again, I invite you to endorse, take issue, respond actively. We have instituted the Right-of-Reply as a forum for exchanges between readers with strong opinions. There has been one so far, also by Malcolm McDonald. I will be delighted to receive more, responding to any of the seven Viewpoints published so far or, indeed, to any other article or my own editorials.

Turning to the continuing Far Eastern theme, we have analysis and discussion of strategic planning in China from an Anglo-Swedish team. Hong Liu is Director of the China Business Centre at Manchester Business School and Lars-Uno Roos is a Vice-President at the Volvo Truck Corporation whose remit includes customer satisfaction. Regular readers will know that we like the realistic perspective that such academic-practitioner collaborations can bring to the issues of marketing intelligence and marketing planning.

Liu and Roos emphasise the influence on the formulation and implementation of marketing strategy in China still exercised by the military strategist Sun Tzu, 2,600 years ago, and the ancient cultural rules summed up as “guanxi” (though they concede that Chinese society may be “modernising” to the extent that it may diminish significantly in the short-term future). Our readers were introduced to guanxi in the marketing context by Leung and Wong (2001). A key element of their argument is that the sense of superiority often exhibited by multinational entrants to the Chinese market, a sort of combination of Levitt's “marketing myopia” and Fulbright's “arrogance of power” lead them to underestimate the local competition. That is a dangerous mistake, for the sheer size of modern Chinese corporations means they now have the financial resources to compensate for any shortage of sophistication.

While this paper may not quite achieve the objectives the authors have set themselves, there is a rich seam of marketing intelligence to be mined from its content. For instance, there are implications for the country-of-origin effects discussed by Fan (2006) in the tandem themed issue and also, in the context of India, by Kinra (2006) in issue number one of this volume. I personally learnt a great deal from the case histories used to illustrate key points. Like Fan, Liu and Roos tell us about Haier, a massive Chinese multinational in consumer durables. I had never heard of it and could not have guessed its nationality from its name.

The counterfeiting of international brands by Chinese companies merits a brief mention in their paper, but is the central theme of the article by Wah-Leung Cheung and Gerard Prendergast of the Hong Kong Baptist University. It is a topic of obvious interest to marketing planners, and one on which the second author has written here before (Prendergast et al., 2002) and extensively elsewhere.

One reviewer, who commended the quality of the study of more than a thousand shoppers in Hong Kong and Shanghai, had reservations about the distinction between “counterfeiting” and “piracy”. As a former lawyer, his view was that the copying of a DVD is clearly theft of the item itself and, therefore, fits the framework of the paper. On the other hand, English law, specifically, does not see the act of manufacturing clothing and misrepresenting its provenance as “piracy” but only as misrepresentation, on the grounds that the purchaser knows that the clothing is counterfeit. The authors counter-argued that “pirated product” conventionally defines a copy sold at a fraction of the price of the authentic copy on the grounds that potential buyers know it is a fake, and that they had interviewed only respondents who knew what they were buying. Some other published studies have described such products as “non-deceptive fakes” two of which are cited in the article. So, if I have this right, caveat emptor applies and the price is the clue. This semantic debate has important implications for strategic planning, and deserves to be followed keenly by anyone more than slightly interested in the competitive consequences of a widespread practice.

Cheung and Prendergast found that well-educated white-collar males were the main buyers of fake DVDs and CDs, and of fake clothing and accessories. The instant availability and range appealed where the former are concerned; appearance was the attraction in the case of the latter. Buyers had a generally positive view of pirated-counterfeit-fake products, except in terms of the ethical and legal issues, and the question of after-sales service.

Roblyn Simeon, of the San Francisco State University, studied the international diffusion of national culture and its potential to enhance brands clearly associated with the country in question, and applied her model of the process to global Japanese brands. The 600 participants in her field survey all lived in or around San Francisco, but two thirds were of non-American origin: an international microcosm for an exploratory study. They were mainly in their 20s or 30s, and more or less half and half male and female.

The results supported two in particular of four research propositions: the greater the familiarity with the manifestations of Japanese popular culture, the more likely a preference for explicitly associated brands, the more positive the view of the culture, the greater the likelihood of positive opinions about the brands. The overall conclusion is that the “global impact of national cultures and subcultures is more closely linked (to branding) than we might expect”. In other words, we are in the country-of-origin realm again.

Simeon's findings offer an intuitively reasonable explanation for the paradoxical appeal to modern consumers of such self-consciously old-fashioned American brands as Harley Davidson or Timberland, or the continuing popularity of McDonalds in the face of repeated exposés relating to the part fast food plays in morbid obesity around the world. Or the instant design-icon status of brands intimately related to the “bella figura” culture of Italy, such as Ducati motorcycles (red, of course) or Armani suits. Positive stereotypes of subcultures within the two countries are being transferred by buyers of a certain type to brands that identify themselves closely with their country of origin. Planners can benefit by identifying the key cultural attributes of a country of origin, and testing for their potential as vehicles for synergy in the communication strategy. This is the technique of “coolhunting” explained by Southgate (2003) in our special issue on the “account planning” discipline in advertising agencies.

We now forsake the Far East, but stay with the macro-theme of export marketing.

The fact that five years have elapsed since the investigation described by Jasmine Williams, of the University of Plymouth but at present an adjunct member of Faculty at Charles Sturt University in Australia, is not her fault at all. We lost track of her submission, not once but twice; but her informed opinion is that the findings relating to small and medium-size enterprises actively engaged in exporting are still largely valid, and the reviewers did not disagree.

A questionnaire-based survey of 2,000 exporting SMEs in one region of the UK contradicted the conventional view that success is closely related to the length of time practising the skills. Instead, the data collected should encourage any ambitious beginner to dedicate financial and human resources to the key task of developing an active and ongoing procedure for gathering market intelligence, to use it, and to expect to reap the harvest. In the literature review from which the fieldwork derived, Williams brings together in one conceptual framework the many influences on export performance hitherto discussed only in a piecemeal fashion. Her study provides the departure point for fruitful further research.

Returning to the land of the Volvo, we have a thoroughly unusual contribution from Olof Holm, of Växjö University. Ever since I entered the academic world to do research into “social marketing” I have known the value of enriching our understanding of conventional marketing strategy by looking at the transfer of its general principles in unconventional settings. Family planning and the four Ps in East Africa swim back into focus in the mind's eye. The Royal Swedish Navy is certainly well removed from the marketing mainstream. Holm spent a month on board a ship on active service, authorised to observe and interview in all places and all times: effectively, an ethnographic study. The vessel's operational remit meant regular past and future situations of high risk, a high degree of criticality in its human and non-human systems, and the crucial need for the two to work efficiently together.

His findings necessarily focus on internal communication, horizontal and lateral, within this particular example of an organisation. He is at pains to extend conclusions to the external communication with which marketing texts are more usually concerned, but the one awkward aspect of the imaginative setting is that it is the desk-bound naval personnel who manage relationships with “markets” and stakeholders. Nevertheless, we should probably pay more attention than we do to the effect of internal working relationships on decisions and actions leading up to plans for the maintenance of external commercial relationships. For example, my own student research examined the cumulative effect of the small shifts as senior management's intentions for a corporate image were “communicated” down the hierarchy and out via the shop-floor sales assistants to the people “out there” who would eventually form and own the image. The total slippage was alarming. Holm provides us with more ingredients for a conceptual model of a vital process.

One internal decision significantly influencing external communication is whether or not to appoint an advertising agency. Given the subsequent inter-organisational dynamics, and the attendant potential for a range of consequences up to outright conflict, the interpersonal forces shaping the decision are of more than passing interest.

Helen Gabriel, Ruth Kottasz and Roger Bennnett, all at London Metropolitan University, investigated a downstream aspect of the client-agency working relationship: awareness of formal models of advertising effect among practitioners, and the extent to which they do or do not apply them. They say that their study is the first to do that specifically. At almost twice the length of the other articles in this issue, it combines a wide-ranging literature review with rigorous questioning of 224 “account planners” in UK advertising agencies and a quantitative analysis of the results. This account planning discipline was the subject of the special issue already mentioned in connection with “coolhunting”. For non-specialists, the editors of that issue explain what is involved, in fair detail (Crosier and Pickton, 2003).

The study found a worrying (my word) level of ignorance. Even among those who claimed some awareness, more than a third seemed to avoid putting it to practical use. If any sort of model was used as the framework for campaign planning and development, it was mostly likely to be one of the family hierarchy-of-effects paradigms – probably gleaned from a standard student textbook. The trouble is that those were developed almost a century ago to remind salesmen of the behavioural states they had to move their prospects through, and were applied to advertising effect by marketing academics more than 40 years ago. Worse, they picture a straightforward linear progression from unawareness of the advertising to trial of the product, without explaining why or how one stage follows the next. Might not the sequence of events sometimes be – for instance – spontaneous purchase, followed by a frantic search for advertising messages offering post-hoc reassurance that the “choice” was wise “decision”? The authors are wise to alert us to the state of the art at the cutting edge of advertising practice, and to call for “harmonised formal models” as a proper basis for both planning and evaluation.

There is one ray of hope: little evidence of general animosity towards theories and models. The question is, in that case, what explains non-adoption? The article offers suggestions, drawn from the literature of knowledge dissemination. Understand the potential user's rationale, and offer persuasive counterarguments: a priority task for academic specialists in marketing communications.

Keith Crosier