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The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the influence that nation-states can have on the engagement of international marketing activities. The purpose of this study is to understand the influence of the institutional response to the COVID-19 pandemic on international marketing activities and to highlight the need to formally incorporate institutional economics into the study of international marketing phenomena.

The paper uses institutional economics as the environmental element of the general theory of competitive rationality to present a foundation for understanding how state actions influence marketing and international marketing activities. Data are presented and empirically tested, demonstrating the heterogeneity of government influence on personal and economic freedoms during the pandemic, both of which influenced international marketing activities. To broaden the implications of this work, we also provide anecdotal illustrations unrelated to the COVID-19 pandemic to demonstrate the breadth of nation-state influence on international marketing activities.

Heterogeneity in nation-state formal and informal institutional elements influence international marketing activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, other incidents, unrelated to the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrate the importance of contextualizing international marketing activities under a holistic institutional framework.

The paper employs the general theory of competitive rationality along with institutional economics to provide a theoretical foundation to better understand the differential impact on international marketing as a result of formal and informal institutional influences. This general framework can be employed to provide a holistic understanding of both international and cross-national marketing activities.

Social media is a product that is co-created by consumers and multinational enterprises, that partially manage the customer experience and that has garnered significant attention in the field of international marketing. However, international marketing scholars have yet to address the societal costs of the use of social media, even as academics in other disciplines and business leaders are raising alarm that social media has created a digital ecosystem that may harm individuals within the global market. The objective of this research is to examine the generalizability of the relationship between the use of social media and the prevalence of depression across countries.

Employing social cohesion theory and the social network approach of the strength of ties, this work examines the relationship between the use of social media and time spent on social media at the country level and the prevalence of depression. The authors examine this issue within a 28-country, eight-year, unbalanced panel dataset, accounting for cultural, economic and structural factors.

The authors find that as more people within a country use social media, the prevalence of depression in that country increases. However, the authors also find that as the average time spent on social media in a country increases the deleterious relationship between the use of social media and the prevalence of depression diminishes.

Answering the calls in the international marketing literature for a greater understanding of the externalities (i.e. consumer well-being effects) of marketing activities of multinational companies, this study demonstrates the varying relationships of the use of and time spent on social media and the prevalence of depression at the population level, across a wide variety of countries, thus also contributing to the effort to improving generalizations from multi-country comparisons in international research.

For international product managers, one critical question is how fast a new product is likely to be adopted and diffused in different nations. One possible way to answer this question is by collecting data on the diffusion in a large number of countries and analyzing them. However, one of the main problems associated with collecting data are the lack of sufficient early‐period sales data to ensure reliable estimations. The estimation process becomes even harder since word‐of‐mouth and imitation play significant roles in the adoption of a new product given that the spread of information in a social system is complex. The purpose of this paper is to assess the relationship among social interactions, cultural differences, and the adoption of new products, and propose a new technique to work with the complexity arising from social interactions, as well as the few data points.

A conceptual framework is presented and propositions are constructed.

The study suggests that, while social interactions are an important element for adoption of new products in every country, the strength of their impact on adoption varies across countries based on culture.

This study contributes by offering a deeper understanding of the impact of social interactions on international innovation adoption and provides a new foundation for the literature by combining individual heterogeneity, cultural differences, and word‐of‐mouth communication in one study.

Understanding the effect of cultural variations on the adoption of new products in a specific country will help management in the forecasting of demand by decreasing the perceived uncertainty of foreign cultural environments.

Even though diffusion models often describe innovation diffusion patterns over time fairly well, it is unclear how social interaction processes in different countries influence the adoption and diffusion speed of new products. There seems to be a large gap in the international marketing literature since it has long been accepted that personal interactions play a key role in product adoption and dissemination and that individuals communicate differently in the different parts of the world. An understanding of social interactions role on adoption of innovation will contribute to the international marketing field.

We examine the citations from four international business (IB) journals over 2000‐2004 to show the areas, the journals, and the institutions that impact IB research. The leading works that influence IB research are primarily management journals, scholarly books, and IB journals. IB research is published in non‐IB journals, as well and this has influenced the recent research in IB journals. U.S. and non‐U.S. academic institutions and non‐academic organizations are among the top 100 institutions that impact IB research, indicating that this research is a truly global endeavor. Finally, recent IB research is influenced more by recent published research than by past research. Scholarly books have become less influential, while the economics, finance, and marketing journals show no change in the influence on IB research over time.