Search results

This study seeks to provide insights concerning the predictors of industrial importers' commitment to their foreign suppliers in a relationship paradigm involving an emerging market.

Integrating a review of the relevant importer-exporter and distributor-supplier relationship literature, a model of importer commitment was developed. Based on survey data obtained from industrial importers for an emerging market, CFA and SEM were employed to test the proposed theoretical model.

The findings significantly support the theoretical framework and most of the hypothesized path relationships in the model. Predictors such as importers' knowledge significantly and positively influenced commitment through the intermediation of trust, supplier opportunism had a significant and negative effect on importer commitment, again through the intermediation of trust, and transaction-specific investment had a direct effect on industrial importers' commitment. Supplier's opportunistic inclinations did not have a significant direct effect on the commitment of the importers.

This research only considers the views of industrial importers that limits generalization. The sample size, constrained by the total number of industrial importers in the country examined, was also somewhat of a limiting factor concerning SEM modeling.

This study suggests the factors that export managers need to consider in maintaining long-term relationship with their foreign buyers, while contributing to building the relationship through knowledge sharing and curbing opportunistic inclinations.

This paper examines the antecedents of trust and commitment in industrial importer and foreign supplier relationships in the context of an emerging market. Based on the earlier literature on B2B exchanges, the role of importers' knowledge in driving commitment through the intermediation of trust offers new insights. This is particularly important because the importers are experiencing unprecedented growth opportunities. Considering their need to make decisions quickly and gain advantages from suppliers, will they remain committed to a particular supplier? Or will their commitment be strengthened by gaining knowledge of the supplier? The tested model offers unique insights.

Relationship trust and commitment are two key dimensions of international exchanges. Both have been extensively investigated from an exporter (as opposed to importer) perspective in developed country (as opposed to developing country) contexts. To address these gaps, this paper aims to develop a model of antecedents and outcomes of importer trust and commitment in two developing countries.

The paper tests the proposed model using data from Chile and Bangladesh. Hypotheses are tested using structural equation modeling (SEM).

SEM analysis reveals that most of the hypotheses are supported in both the Bangladeshi and Chilean context. The findings of this paper also suggest that the effects of importer transaction‐specific investments on importer commitment are distinct in the Bangladeshi context.

Practically, these results show that trust and commitment are essential for enhancing importer relationship performance in developing countries. Importer trust in a foreign supplier is effective when suppliers are competent and provide relatively superior facilities, as opposed to opportunistic proclivity. Importer commitment to a foreign supplier is stronger when importers perceive that the foreign supplier is not opportunistic, but is knowledgeable and experienced with the importer market, and they perceive that it is an advantage importing from that supplier. Cultural similarity between importers and foreign suppliers improves importer trust in both countries. However, importer commitment in Chile increases with importer transaction‐specific investment, but this is not found to be the case in Bangladesh.

This paper contributes to the importer‐exporter exchange relationship literature by testing a model of antecedents and outcomes of importer trust and commitment. The tested model is one of few that considers developing country contexts and incorporates two novel antecedents of trust and commitment: importer knowledge and experience, and supplier resource competency.

This study aims to examine whether and how cultural (dis) similarity between business entities enhances or impairs the development of commitment in the trust building process in industrial importer-foreign supplier relationships.

Drawing on theoretical lenses of transaction cost economics, resource-based view and dynamic capability view, this study investigates how cultural (dis)similarity moderates the effects of opportunism, transaction-specific investment (TSI), the relative advantage of importing and communication on commitment, leading to building trust in business relationships. Using structural equation modeling and moderated regression analysis, the study tested several predicted effects using a sample of 154 industrial importers drawn from a developing country in Asia.

A key finding of the study suggests that supplier opportunism comes into play and is negatively associated with industrial importer commitment as cultural dissimilarity increases. For culturally similar countries, opportunism does not affect commitment. Conversely, TSI has a positive effect on commitment for culturally similar countries; for dissimilar countries, TSI has no effect. The study also corroborates several additional hypotheses prevalent in the literature.

Cross-sectional data rather than longitudinal data, single country rather than multi-country perspectives and data from the importer’s side rather than from both importer and exporter may affect generalizability. Future research ought to address these issues to provide further insights.

The paper enriches the literature and extends the nomological network for international business theory by introducing the moderating effect of business cultural similarity in building commitment. Managerial perspectives are also gleaned from the findings.

Importers make use of two strategies in seeking new suppliers: namely an incremental strategy and an evolutionary strategy. In using an incremental strategy the importers look for new suppliers in the existing buying region in which they are working, although in no way are they confined to this region. In the case of an evolutionary strategy, they seek suppliers within a totally new geographical and cultural region. Importers try as far as is possible to apply an incremental strategy and only when this is no longer viable do they switch to using an evolutionary strategy. Five factors govern the choice of which strategy to employ: responsibility, product prices, knowledge about the buying area, transport system and product quantity.

In the mainstream relationship management literature, critical appraisal of the relationship paradigm in an international setting is virtually non-existent. The extant literature reveals a gap in terms of linking relationship management theories with international management. Furthermore, little research attention has been paid to synthesise the existing theories in a cohesive manner towards developing a theoretical paradigm in the interface of the importer-supplier relationship dyad. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to strengthen the theoretical grounds of relationship marketing in an international setting in an importer-exporter relationship context.

The paper follows a comprehensive review approach and applies the fundamental theory of trust and commitment to identify the relational factors. More precisely, the paper identifies and applies other relevant theories such as internationalisation process theory, resource-based theory of the firm, dependence theory and transaction cost theory in developing an innovative theoretical paradigm.

Based on the integration of extant theories, this paper proposes a new direction in the theoretical realm of the trust and commitment building process within an importer and supplier relationship management paradigm. The research concludes that trust and commitment are the focal factors within the international relational paradigm.

The proposed research direction suggests an emerging framework integrating mainstream theoretical variables of trust and commitment in importer and foreign-supplier context. This novel framework has the potential for use in further research.

This paper advances a grounded theoretical exploration within an international management domain in the context of importers and foreign-suppliers.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how different policy perspectives or logics regarding industry organising affect network interaction, with particular focus on how the availability of resources is organised.

To examine this, the authors compare two cases from the Norwegian seafood industry: in the pelagic industry, the main resource (mackerel) is caught at sea by fishing vessels and trade is restricted by an auction system, whereas in the salmon industry, the main resource (farmed salmon) is an industrial product produced at fish farms and there are no such restrictions.

The results indicate that conditions under which resources are available to a network have strong effects on connected relationships: in the pelagic industry, interaction in the network becomes supplier-directed in an attempt to reduce the uncertainty created by unstable and restricted availability of resources, whereas in the salmon industry the interaction becomes customer directed as resource availability is stable and predictable. Here the actors can broaden the scope of interaction and they can direct their efforts to solve their customers’ problems, whereas this is difficult in the pelagic industry. The authors conclude that policy considerations play a major role in these effects. If the resource (fish) is seen as a commodity and the interaction is seen as a market mechanism, the policies designed to facilitate the exchange of resources will be beneficial for the actors directly involved, but may have unintended negative consequences for indirect relationships.

For policy makers this implies that whenever developing an industrial policy there are strong reasons to look beyond the single transaction in order to create policies that are effective and/or beneficial for all involved and connected parties.

This article focuses on the relationship marketing approach to marketing of agricultural products. The article provides specific insights into, and comparisons between, suppliers of two particular agricultural products sectors: in Britain, the fresh produce (fruits and vegetables) sector and, in New Zealand, the wine sector. The article examines the nature of marketing relationships from the perspective of the suppliers in these sectors and their relationships, networks, and interactions with importers and retail buyers in the food and beverage industry. The research methodology is qualitative and inductive in nature and utilises multiple cases. Interpretation is first through content analysis of each individual case in order to identify important themes, clusters, and patterns in the research data and secondly through across‐case analysis. Investigated marketing issues include the following: nature of relationship marketing, implementation of relationship marketing, and monitoring and measurement of relationship marketing.

The purpose of this paper is to identify important elements of a strategy to facilitate small farmer participation in international supply chains for fresh produce.

The study employs survey data collected from a national sample of US fresh produce importers. Their concerns and suggestions regarding potential for transactions with small Mexican farmers were assessed, with factor analysis providing a thematic summary of their perspectives.

Results of the study reveal that US importers are not uniformly pessimistic about the ability of small farmers to meet their demands. On the contrary, almost one‐third said they probably would work with small farmers in the near future. In general, importers are interested in transactions in which the product meets consumer and government expectations and is grown on the buyer's terms, the grower is reliable over time, the transaction is simplified, and the grower handles transportation. Importers rate small farmers poorly on their ability to achieve the last two factors, but these are also the items rated least important to the importers. New approaches to building market capacity in small farmers are also highly valued by the importers, including government investment guarantees, and arrangements for facilitating contact between importers and growers. More traditional methods, such as cooperatives and use of brokers, were not rated as highly.

The study relies on cross‐sectional, self‐report data from one side of the grower/importer dyad. Incorporating longitudinal data with a dyadic perspective could provide additional insight.

A practitioner perspective on the challenges in international fruit and vegetable supply chains, particularly as relates to developing countries, is of considerable value. Not only can governments choose improved policies for improving market readiness for the growers, but also members of supply chains themselves can identify tactics for ensuring successful transactions by enhancing coordination. The prospects for a win‐win outcome for growers and importers are improved.

Relationship marketing has been playing an important role in the development of marketing theory and practice. Though the concept has been extensively applied in international marketing in understanding the dynamics of exporter-importer relationships, few studies have looked at dyadic data to investigate the impact of mutuality of relational variables on the exporter-importer relationships. The objective of this study is to understand the impact of mutuality of key relational variables on exporter-importer relationship performance. A dyadic model of mutuality is proposed. The model highlights the impact of balance, level and quality of perceptual bi-directionality of relational variables.

The model was tested using dyadic data collected from exporter-importer relationships involving Australian exporters and their Southeast Asian import partners through a cross-sectional, quantitative survey. Mutuality of relationship constructs was measured using the perceptual bi-directionality (PBD) method.

The results support the central hypothesis that mutuality of relational constructs has an impact on relationship performance.

The study is the first to apply the perceptual bi-directionality method to measure mutuality of relational constructs in an exporter-importer setting. The study contributes to the general understanding of international business and exporter-importer relationship performance in particular.

This study aims to increase understanding of factors influencing the international marketing (IM) strategy of products from emerging markets (EMs) to international markets.

This study conducted case studies by collecting qualitative data through semistructured interviews with respondents from four food product companies in Bangladesh.

This study finds that the firms employ local Bangladeshi people who are knowledgeable in the company culture. They strategically focus on countries where the Bangladeshi diaspora lives and initially target them, approaching natives later. They adapt and customize products to the importers’ requirements to make them visible and increase understanding between product providers and local customers. The findings show that EM firms encounter a mentality that poor countries produce poor quality products; this mindset makes the internationalization of their business difficult.

This research contributes to international product marketing of EM firms by constructing a model of a modern people-oriented marketing strategy for food products. This study contributes to literature on culture by illustrating that the cultural dimensions of collectivism and uncertainty avoidance enhance the development of networks and trust and impact marketing strategy.

This study theorizes the importance of context and an innovation-driven modern people-oriented IM strategy that adapts to customers’ preferences for food products and emphasizes the contribution of diaspora. This research reveals that Bangladeshi firms face challenges both because customers link the country and the companies to low-quality products and because governmental regulations prevent them from establishing a local presence in other countries. This study analyzes challenges EM firms face in the process of IM and the factors affecting Bangladesh in particular.