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This article reports the findings of an investigation into marketing management in the Netherlands. It specifically analyses the level of marketing orientation and practice in Dutch industry and also examines the relationship between the implementation of the marketing concept and effectiveness. The results are then compared with previous studies, primarily conducted in the United States and Britain. In line with the research findings in those countries, the present study confirmed findings of previous research on the relationship that exists between the level of strategic marketing planning and company performance, thus giving more credence to the empirical findings in these studies.

Many retailers are expanding throughout Europe, while it is well‐known that large differences still exist between the European countries. This paper aims to explore to what extent the historical expansion sequence patterns of retailers operating across Europe are driven by cultural factors.

The paper derives a cultural map of Western Europe based on data of Hofstede and Hall. Three important cultural clusters are identified. Next, this study investigates the expansion sequences of nine big EU‐ and US‐based fashion‐clothing retailers across those three cultural clusters.

The results show that initial expansion typically takes place in a neighbor country belonging to the same cultural cluster. Subsequent expansion tends to follow a stepwise cluster‐by‐cluster pattern, where retailers make cluster jumps, first expanding in the same cluster, but already move to another before the first is completed.

For US/Canada‐based retailers as well as for European‐based retailers it is crucial to fully recognize the differences between European countries, but it is very useful to consider their similarities too. Dividing the European market into clusters of countries seems to be a pragmatic way of handling differences and similarities. This information can help managers to make better decisions on entry sequences in foreign markets.

To the authors' best knowledge, this is the first study analyzing the complete international entry sequences, i.e. both the initial and subsequent entries of retailers in Western Europe, from a national cultural perspective.

I'VE said it before, and I'll say it again: Eastbourne is an excellent place for a conference, and I set out for it after five years' absence with the hope that its handsome and genial presence would produce something better than the mixture of ordinary, obvious and sometimes inaudible papers that have been a constituent of more than one intervening conference. That towns can affect such occasions is no doubt a farfetched conceit, but they certainly affect me; as soon as I arrived the environmental magic worked, and old friends and new faces were seen in the golden light of perfect autumn weather.

The purpose of this paper is to present an empirical investigation into the relationships between the selected organizational variables, business process improvement (BPI) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) success.

It is based on a sample of 96 firms operating in an Asian (Hong Kong) setting. Non‐parametric statistical tests are conducted on the sample.

It has found that the extent of BPI is positively related to ERP success, and senior management support of BPI (MSB), and senior management support of IT (MSI) and CEO‐IT distance are negatively related. However, it has also found that there exist no statistically significant relationships between approaches to business process changes and BPI, between MSI and ERP success, and between CEO‐IT distance and MSB. It has also yielded divergent findings for the impacts of CEO‐IT distance on the levels of senior MSI and MSB for the sub‐samples of firms of Western and Asian origin.

This research has produced empirical evidence in an Asian setting for some of the hypothesized relationships and pointed out that the impacts of certain organizational variables may differ across firms of different geographic (cultural) background. However, it is primarily empirical in nature and is weak in its theoretic underpinning to explain why these organizational variables are adopted in the study.

The findings of this study in an Asian setting add to those conducted in the West, and thus help fill the lacuna of research involving the variables relevant to ERP adoption.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the innovation adoption process taking place in the public relations field through the use of Web 2.0 applications and social network activities.

Innovation adoption of electronic public relations (E-PR) is examined at personal, organizational, and environmental levels by employing, for each one of the previous, a number of different sub-dimensions leading to the creation and verification of a hierarchical tree structure.

E-PR innovation adoption can be influenced at personal, organizational, and environmental levels. Each of the aforementioned levels is hierarchically linked to a number of factors that can actually speed up the process.

Never before to the authors’ knowledge the E-PR adoption process was examined as a hierarchical model bridging the innovation adoption literature with the public relations literature.