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This chapter sheds light on the ‘country of origin’ concept. The author contends that this concept is composed of micro- and macro-components. He argues that the tourists’ hedonic and monetary gratifications are derived from the travel experiences. Therefore, the country-of-origin image (COI) can have an impact on the destination’s brand extension. In this light, this contribution examines the relationship among COI, overall brand equity and brand extension. The author implies that the hedonic and monetary values can have a moderating effect on the impact of COI and on destination brand extension.

This study investigates how direct cultural interaction between a supplier country’s personnel and host country purchasing decision makers (HCNs) occurring during the exporting of professional, high-contact services can help shape the latter’s perception of the image of the supplier country and their willingness to buy its services or products. The article develops a theoretical framework that identifies those key drivers and their relationship.

This is a conceptual paper based on a comprehensive review of the literature complemented by a pilot study with offshore executive MBA programs.

A conceptual model is developed with a series of testable propositions.

The framework should help companies and organizations involved in the exporting of such services devise programs to bolster the image of their country as a provider of these and other services and products.

Trade in services is becoming a lifeline for many developed countries that have seen their manufacturing industries relocate to low labor-cost countries. Thus, it is imperative for these countries to bolster their COO to gain competitive advantage. Developing countries can also use such a framework as a means of improving the overall image of their own country and its products.

This research complements those rare studies done on the acculturation of HCNs by examining, for the first time, this process in the context of the exporting of professional services and on how it can lead to changes in the perception of the HCNs vis-à-vis the image of the supplier country.

This study explores the influence of cultural heritage tourism perception on China's tourism image. It analyzes the role of the spiritual bond established between overseas Chinese youth and the motherland during their visit to the cultural heritage sites in China. This study constructs a theoretical model with 350 overseas Chinese youth as samples based on the identity theory, Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) theory, and Howard-Sheth model. The results show that cultural heritage tourism perception directly and positively promotes cultural identity among overseas Chinese youth. It is also indirectly and positively associated with their cultural identity through enhancing the tourism image. Cultural intelligence plays a positive moderating role between cultural heritage tourism perception and cultural identity. The results provide significant implications for developing cultural heritage tourism and cultural communication.

Purpose – The main aim of this chapter is to identify the factors that motivate outward Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from Turkey to EU countries, looking into the problem at the firm level with a marketing focus, trying to understand whether or not there are any Turkey-specific prevailing marketing-related drivers.

Design/methodology/approach – With a distinction between developed and emerging/developing countries and their MNCs’ role in world trade and FDI, the literature review focuses on micro-view motives, particularly marketing-related ones, rather than macro-view motives which are mostly studied in the literature. Based on the literature review, the importance of Turkish MNCs and their increasing role in the world trade is briefly summarized.

Looking into the problem at the firm level with a marketing focus, a series of in-depth interviews with top executives were conducted as an exploratory study in order to explore and understand the role of marketing-related motives in Outward Foreign Direct Investment (OFDI) decisions of Turkish MNCs. For this purpose, 10 in-depth interviews with 13 top executives were conducted with tailor-made questionnaires.

Findings – The analysis of interviews revealed some different OFDI drivers and motivations for the Turkish MNCs compared to the factors mentioned in the literature, as well as iterating some common motives with the OFDI literature. Parallel to the FDI literature, it is observed that the Turkish MNCs mainly started their internationalization attempts by taking somewhat less risky and smaller steps.

As a result of qualitative research, the support is provided for the theoretical perspective that micro variables are more important than macro variables for Emerging Multinationals (EMNCs), particularly for Turkish MNCs; therefore, some Turkey-specific motives were also identified.

Originality/value of chapter – Although there is a consensus in recent literature on the most persistent group of motives influencing OFDI activities of EMNCs in developed countries, the underlying marketing-related objectives which are crucial to sustain competitive advantage have not been analysed and investigated sufficiently. This study is an attempt to fill this gap by identifying the most persistent marketing-related motives and give important insights about country-specific ones encouraging Turkish EMNCs to carry out OFDI in EU.

The chapter looks for the conditions of a contribution of microcredit to poverty alleviation.

It uses socioeconomical hypotheses for defining a direct and fast positive effect of microcredit on the income of the poorest. The contribution raises ten issues or conditions at a micro, meso and macro level.

It is not often that these ten conditions are all completely met. So, the impact of microcredit is generally low as regards the alleviation of poverty. The problems to achieve them are linked to the specificities of the clients and of the prevailing institutions in various sub-Saharan Africa countries.

The chapter clearly identifies the limits of microcredit and their reasons.

Micro hospitals are a new form of for-profit health-care facility with rapid expansion in some parts of the country. They continue to grow in Texas without in-depth public understanding or explicit policy guidance on their role in the health-care system. Our project aims to define socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of areas served by micro and regular hospitals, and by doing so help assess micro hospitals' impact in expanding health-care access for disadvantaged populations in Texas.

We (1) estimated hospital service areas (catchment areas) with a spatial model based on advanced Geographic Information System (GIS) methods using a proprietary ESRI traffic network; (2) assigned population socioeconomic measures to the catchment areas from the 2014–2018 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, weighted with an empirically tested Gaussian distribution; (3) used two-tailed t-tests to compare means of population characteristics between micro and regular hospital catchment areas; and (4) conducted logistic regressions to examine relationships between selected population variables and the associated odds of micro hospital presence.

We found micro hospitals in Texas tend to serve a population less stressed in health-care access compared to those who are more in need as measured by various dimensions of disadvantages.

Our analysis takes a cross sectional look at the population characteristics of micro hospital service areas. Even though the initial geographic choices of micro hospitals may not reflect the long-term population changes in specific neighborhoods, our analysis can provide policy makers a tool to examine health-care access for disadvantaged populations at given point in time. As the population socioeconomic characteristics have long been associated with health-care inequality, we hope our analysis will help foster structural policy considerations that balance growing health-care delivery innovations and their social accountability.

We used GIS based spatial modeling to dynamically capture the potential patient basis by travel time calculated with a street network dataset, rather than using the traditional static census tract to define hospital service areas. By integrating both spatial and nonspatial dimensions of healthcare access, we demonstrated that the policy considerations on the implications of equal opportunity for health-care access need to take into account the social realities and lived experiences of those experiencing the most vulnerability in our society, rather than a conceptual “equality” existing in the spatial and market abstraction.

Investigating the concept of sustainability marketing and the scope of its implementation in European countries can involve two types of sources. On the one hand, there are theoretical secondary sources, that is scientific studies concerning the conceptualization of sustainability marketing, the sources and determinants of its development and an analysis of the sustainability marketing process. This type also includes secondary sources in the form of the findings of previous research in the specific area conducted by independent research centres and institutes as well as non-governmental organizations. Such sources make it possible to identify the behaviour and attitudes of business managers with respect to market changes, the concept of sustainable development, and social and environmental marketing, as well as the extent of their responsiveness to these phenomena. On the other hand, there are primary sources in the form of empirical studies, which are particularly important when the issues under investigation are rarely explored, as is the case with the concept of sustainability marketing. These sources play an important role in explaining some of the regularities connected with the development of this concept and provide an appropriate basis for inference. This chapter will present the methodological aspects of the research on sustainability marketing in SMEs.