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The purpose of this paper is to study the nature of the strategy formation and its impact on firm performance in relation to market development and product innovation.

The paper is based on an empirical study of 91 Austrian SMEs which covers a time period of ten years. Strategy formation was captured by an analysis of strategic intentions and corresponding actions in two surveys carried out in 1995 and 2003.

The study finds no direct association between strategy formation and performance, though, emergent strategists had less often a growth orientation. Taking into account industry dynamics, shows, contrary to our expectations, that companies which employed an emergent market development strategy achieved higher sales growth in stable than in dynamic industries.

The question of the superiority of planned vs emergent strategies has a long debate in strategy formation literature. The authors contribute to this question by investigating the role of different information sources for the formation of market and product innovation strategies and its impact on the performance in different environments over a ten-year time period.

The purpose of this paper is to find out if the approach to strategy-making taken by small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) affects their performance.

This paper reports findings from a longitudinal study of small Austrian manufacturing firms. It investigates their use of deliberate or emergent strategy-making and how this affected market development and product innovation.

When you think about strategy development, perhaps you think of long, serious discussions between groups of managers. But what if the organization is a small business? Leaders of SMEs do not have that option. So if an SME starts a new initiative – product development, say, or a change of marketing approach – how does this happen? Is it planned by the entrepreneur? Or – if you do not have middle managers with time to spend on strategy development – does adopting a “try it and see” approach give better results?

It demonstrates the benefits of a longitudinal investigation of the performance effects of deliberate and emergent strategy development.

It shows how the use of emergent or deliberate approaches to strategy development is linked to SME performance.

It highlights the benefits of using diverse information sources – including customers and employees – as an integral part of strategy-making to identify market opportunities and trends.

It covers an unusually long time period, enabling researchers to compare firm performance in stable and dynamic market conditions.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and expand the concept of a marketing system for developing a more dynamic and nuanced understanding of marketing. The purpose of the proposed framework is to extend this literature by making salient and explicit how context, market system and value creation are theoretically interrelated. To accomplish this objective, the authors use the framework proposed by Layton (2019) as the theoretical foundation to acquire insights into the market. Particularly, they investigate how four distinct marketing systems (i.e. anarchy, structured, emergent and purposeful market systems) operate in a developing economy. In addition, the study explores the market's effects of technological advancement, sociocultural influences, historical background and political institutions, as well as the responses of political entities, firms and consumers. Also, the positive and negative effects of the various marketing systems are analyzed. Finally, the authors investigate the changing marketplace in various industrial sectors (e.g. home appliances, food, apparel/fashion and transportation) to provide marketing researchers and practitioners with insights. In essence, the study focuses on the sectors related to everyday consumption.

This analysis uses a theoretical approach to extend the understanding concept of marketing. To examine the numerous market systems in India, the authors use an approach developed by Layton (2007). This theoretical approach is intended to sensitize scholars to critical processes rather than a hypothetico-deductive analysis with a prediction goal (Turner, 1986). Epistemologically, this analysis can be classified as a form of discovery-oriented theory development (Wells, 1993).

Although all four systems (e.g. autarchic, emergent, purposeful and structured) are ingrained in India, their functionality differs from the Western system and among industries. For example, the apparel sector appears more autarchic, but the food industry is more purposeful. How the home appliance market operates demonstrates the transition from an autarchic to an emergent system. The authors also uncover additional environmental factors that impact the four types of marketing systems and moderator roles of governate agencies and nonprofit organizations. The externality and positive outcomes also emerged throughout the analysis.

This study articulates the four types of marketing systems and illustrates the environmental factors/antecedents and outcomes for the exchange and value creation. Most importantly, it adds value to the literature by emphasizing the role of government agencies and unrestricted institutions in the mechanism. It also uncovers cultural elements such as spirituality as a catalyst for exchange and value creation.

The analysis provides practitioners with insights into operating the firm in India by articulating the industrial differentiations and the exchange/value creation. Specifically, it provides a blueprint for strategic analysis that can be used prior to market entry to increase the likelihood of market entry success by understanding the nuanced differences that lead to significant operational difficulties if not properly prepared for and managed.

This study adds to our existing knowledge of marketing from a systemic standpoint. It also broadens and explicates marketing system theory by assessing the uniqueness of developing markets.

This paper aims to identify both the traditional and novel forms of marketing behind New Zealand Prime Minster Jacinda Ardern’s landslide victory in the 2020 New Zealand General Election during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This research analysed both qualitative and quantitative data, including over 70 primary sources, the perspectives of practitioners, polling and data from surveys with over 450,000 respondents. The qualitative data was analysed interpretively against established theoretical concepts, whereas the quantitative data was analysed through descriptive statistics.

This research found that COVID-19 drastically changed what the public prioritised, allowing Ardern and Labour to position themselves as guardians of government stability, while camouflaging previous delivery failures. Labour also used a more emergent market-oriented and “polite” populist political marketing strategy.

While the survey data used is not a perfect sample of the population, it is the largest public opinion survey in New Zealand and, given its convergence with other sources, provides valuable insights into political marketing during a crisis more broadly.

This research reinforces marketing’s most important aspect; the market should drive action. How decision makers respond to the market should depend on the environment. Thus, up-to-date market research becomes even more important during a crisis, as the environment changes rapidly. This leaves prior assumptions obsolete and implies strategy needs to be adaptive. Additionally, greater public attention provides governing leaders with the opportunity to present a more well-rounded leadership image.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research to look at marketing while in government and election campaigning in the context of successful management of a global pandemic.

The ubiquity of digitally intermediated interactions is changing the ways in which social interaction creates the cognitive and institutional underpinnings of new markets. Logics that define markets used to be localized, but they now emerge from crowds that span – and persist – across time and space. This article builds a theory of how crowds emerge and evolve in a way that influences the emergence of shared logics and helps explain why some markets are viable while others are not. What is revealed is that a crowd has a hidden niche structure that determines the fate of a new market.

The philosophical foundations determine how an academic discipline identifies, understands and analyzes phenomena. The choice of philosophical perspective is vital for both marketing and service research. This paper aims to propose a social and systemic perspective that addresses current challenges in service and marketing research by revisiting the philosophy of science debate.

The paper revisits the philosophy of science debate to address the implications of an emergent, complex and adaptive view of marketing and service research. It draws on critical realism by combining structuration and systemic perspectives.

A recursive perspective, drawing on structures and action, is suggested as it includes multiple actors’ intentions and captures underlying drivers of market exchange as a basis for developing marketing and service strategies in practice. This is aligned with other scholars arguing for a more systemic, adaptive and complex view of markets in light of emerging streams in academic marketing and service research, ranging from value cocreation, effectuation, emergence and open source to empirical phenomena such as digitalization, robotization and the growth of international networks.

The reciprocal dynamic between individuals and the overarching system provides a reflexivity approach intrinsic to the service ecosystem. This creates new avenues for research on marketing and service phenomena.

This paper discusses critics, conflicts and conceptualization in service research. It suggests a possible approach for service research and marketing scholars capable of responding to current complexities and turbulence in economic and societal contexts.

This paper aims to examine the tensions between global and local corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives developed by multinationals managing subsidiaries in different emergent countries. Multinationals carry out a wide array of political activities (Boddewyn and Brewer, 1994; Hillman and Hitt, 1999; Rehbein and Schuler, 1995) supporting their economic objectives, even though the political landscape and the institutional environment may vary significantly in the different countries in which they are located (Luo, 2006). This can raise issues related to the management of cross-border political imperatives as well as the coordination of political activities among multinational companies and their subsidiaries.

Based on a documentary research, this paper analyses the key challenges facing the non-market and CSR strategies of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) a world leading, research-based pharmaceutical and health-care company.

The paper further looks at the way in which GSK deploys its global non-market strategies and manages their alignment with local CSR initiatives in emerging markets, particularly in China.

Further research is required to address the question of international CSR mediation and moderation of this imbalance between pressures for global consistency and local responsiveness. More specifically, in-depth case studies designed to target local managers, as well as their counterparts from the MNE headquarters, should allow us to more effectively analyse and capture the perceived biases with regard to the way the CSR agenda is set at the central level, in light of its global strategy and to the needs and demands of their local host countries’ stakeholders.

This exploratory research based on secondary data allows an interesting base for analysis of the synergies between CSR, non-market strategies and international strategic management which provide a promising base for continuing research.

Combining institutional work and actor engagement (AE) literature, this paper aims to elucidate how the collective action of market shaping occurs through the interplay between market shapers’ institutional work and engagement of other market actors. While markets are shaped by actors’ purposive actions and recent literature notes the need to also mobilize AE, the underlying process remains nebulous.

This paper is conceptual but supported by an illustrative case study: the Winding Tree. This blockchain-based, decentralized travel marketplace shapes a market by decoupling existing resource linkages, creating new ones and stabilizing others through a dynamic, iterative process between the market shaper’s institutional work and others’ AE.

The paper develops a dynamic, iterative framework of market shaping through increased resource density, revealing the interplay between seven types of market shapers’ institutional work distilled from the literature and changes in other market actors’ engagement dispositions, behaviors and the diffusion of AE through the market.

This research contributes to the emergent market shaping and market innovation literature by illustrating how the engagement of market actors is a fundamental means of market shaping. Specifically, it advances understanding of how market shapers’ institutional work leads to new resource linkages and higher resource density in emergent market systems through AE. The resultant framework offers an original, critical foundation for future market shaping research.

The study of markets encompasses a number of disciplines – including anthropology, economics, history, and sociology – and a larger number of theoretical frameworks (see Plattner, 1989; Reddy, 1984; Smelser & Swedberg, 1994). Despite this disciplinary and theoretical diversity, scholarship on markets tends toward either realist or constructionist accounts (Dobbin, 1994; Dowd & Dobbin, forthcoming).¹ Realist accounts treat markets as extant arenas that mostly (or should) conform to a singular ideal-type. Realists thus take the existence of markets as given and examine factors that supposedly shape all markets in a similar fashion. When explaining market outcomes, they tout such factors as competition, demand, and technology; moreover, they can treat the impact of these factors as little influenced by context. Constructionist accounts treat markets as emergent arenas that result in a remarkable variety of types. They problematize the existence of markets and examine how contextual factors contribute to this variety. When explaining market outcomes, some show that social relations and/or cultural assumptions found in a particular setting can qualify the impact of competition (Uzzi, 1997), demand (Peiss, 1998), and technology (Fischer, 1992). Constructionists thus stress the contingent, rather than universal, processes that shape markets.

As specialisation takes root in human communities, the economics of scale and of diversity come into play. Scale leads to product markets, specialised firms, channels, and to industries. Diversity generates peasant markets, shopping malls, and business eco‐systems. These outcomes are all examples of marketing systems, and are typical of the patterns that emerge, grow, adapt and evolve in complex transaction flows. Marketing systems are multi‐level, path dependent, dynamic systems, embedded within a social matrix, and interacting with institutional and knowledge environments. The purpose of this paper is to outline a number of propositions that might serve as a basis for a theory of marketing systems.

The paper draws on historical research into the evolution of exchange and on examples of markets and exchange practices from marketing, anthropology, sociology, and economics. It utilises results from complex adaptive systems theory, from the networks and markets literatures, and from ecology, to formulate a series of propositions that identify properties believed to be common to all marketing systems.

Marketing systems are identified and categorized as emergent patterns in flows of transactions. In total, 12 foundational propositions are suggested. The propositions are complementary to those suggested by S‐D logic.

This paper offers a fresh approach to the study of marketing systems, developing relevant theory. Marketing systems link micro choices with macro outcomes, with implications ranging from disaster recovery to distributive justice and QOL outcomes.