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The purpose of this study is to explore the role of social media usage among business-to-business sales professionals in China. Specifically, the authors seek to define and explore the unique ways in which Chinese salespeople use social media, with a special emphasis on the role of guanxi. Guanxi is a complex cultural construct that revolves around the exchange of favors to build trust and connection for business purposes.

Three in-depth interviews of sales managers from two industries along with survey data from 42 pharmaceutical sales representatives were collected to gain an understanding of the general usage and attitudes toward social media in the sales process in China.

Results indicated that virtually all the salespeople in the sample were highly familiar with social media and integrated it into the sales process. Furthermore, all participants indicated that their companies were highly supportive of the use of social media with their customers. More importantly, salespeople in China view social media as a critical tool in building guanxi with their customers. Findings from this exploratory study are used to create a conceptual framework for understanding the important role of social media in building guanxi in China.

While the sample is limited to three managerial interviews and 42 survey responses, the data indicated a near universal acceptance and use of social media among Chinese salespeople. Most importantly, social media appears to be the modern gateway to the ancient and culturally unique construct of guanxi that is absolutely indispensable to successful business-to-business sales performance in China.

The structural challenges within China make trust and emotional connection essential to any potential business relationship. Trust is at the core of guanxi. Any firm hoping to succeed in China must understand guanxi and the use of Chinese social media to help build it. This study adds to the knowledge and understanding of guanxi and begins to elucidate the uses of social media as a tool to build and maintain it.

Social media appears to be the modern gateway to the ancient and culturally unique construct of guanxi that is absolutely indispensable to successful business-to-business sales performance in China. This study deepens our understanding of not only guanxi but also how the modern phenomenon of social media is affecting it.

This is one of very few studies to investigate the use of social media among salesforces in China. More importantly, the authors know of no other study linking social media with guanxi.

Proposes a preliminary model of analysis of the key success and failure factors in retail internationalization. Indicates that a business distance between the domestic and target markets is creating a “prism effect” on the original competitive advantages. Gives the examples of the internationalization of French hypermarket in the USA (failure) and in Asia (success) as illustrations. Outlines future research directions and managerial implications.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the emergent role of market in cultural enterprises.

The authors consider market as network and identify the role of the interaction process with a special focus on theatre organizations.

The interactions are examined on the basis of relationship models, distinguishing for each of them the progressive changes in their structural components (actors, activities and resources) and the outcomes (economic, artistic, social) produced.

The value of the study is to identify market representation by theatre organizations and to analyse their interactions with the market as a cumulative and continuous process.

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to develop a conceptual framework for studying value creation derived from an ethical perspective, in a business marketing context. Design/methodology/approach – First, a conceptual and comparative analysis is made of the ethics and value concepts in two research traditions: the stakeholder approach and the business network approach. Second, a conceptual framework is developed that contains tools for conducting research on value co‐creation in business networks from an ethical perspective. An exemplifying case study from the paper industry is included. Findings – Four key concepts are proposed for further research into ethics and value creation in business networks that enable the study of ethical embeddedness: ethical network identity, ethical role, ethical position, and ethical atmosphere. The analysis also presents fundamental differences between the stakeholder and the business network approaches when dealing with ethics and value. Research limitations/implications – The developed conceptual framework should be applied in more extended empirical settings to evaluate its usefulness. Practical implications – The paper provides an ethical perspective for understanding value in industrial markets using a network approach. Originality/value – The study presents a novel approach to incorporating ethics and value creation to an industrial marketing context. Ethical issues are traditionally studied using stakeholder, agency or institutional perspectives and such research in business‐to‐business contexts is almost non‐existent. The business network approach contains very few studies from an ethical point of view. The paper covers this gap and offers a starting‐point for further inquiry into this field.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how business-to-business (B2B), intercultural, interpersonal salesperson–customer relationships develop using the lens of identity management theory (IMT; Imahori and Cupach, 2005).

The research uses qualitative semi-structured interviews on 18 targeted relationships with customers from another culture conducted with business-to-business salespeople.

The findings indicate that our respondents' relationships moved from trial toward enmeshment and on occasion toward the renegotiation phase, as described in IMT. In the case of low cultural diversity between salesperson and customer, the relationships reached the trial and enmeshment phase. In the case of high cultural diversity between salesperson and customer, the relationships on occasion evolved toward the renegotiation phase. Salespeople's cultural intelligence (CQ) facilitates the development of interpersonal, intercultural salesperson–customer relationships.

The authors transfer IMT from the personal relationship development arena to B2B intercultural, interpersonal relationships, address a gap in the literature in the understanding of salesperson–customer interpersonal relationships in different contexts and develop a theoretical model to understand intercultural, interpersonal salesperson–customer relationship development across different levels of cultural diversity.

This paper aims to examine the effect of intercultural accommodation efforts on service quality perceptions among ethnic minority consumers. Specifically, the paper postulates that during an intercultural service encounter, the impact of the service provider’s language and ethnicity on the consumer’s service quality perceptions is moderated by the level of service involvement, consumer acculturation and perceived discrimination, which, in turn, influence purchase intent.

A 2 × 2 between-subjects experimental design with an online nationwide consumer panel of Hispanic consumers was conducted where 377 participants were randomly assigned to a series of service encounter scenarios in the banking service context to manipulate accommodation efforts (yes vs no) and the level of involvement with the service (high vs low).

When such language and ethnicity accommodations were offered, highly acculturated minority consumers regarded the service encounter less favorably than low acculturated minority consumers. Moreover, during low-involvement service encounters, intercultural accommodations positively impacted consumer’s service quality perceptions compared to situations involving high-involvement services. Also, minority consumers with perceptions of past discrimination had less favorable evaluations of the service quality than when such perceptions were nonexistent when intercultural accommodation efforts were made by the service provider.

The findings add to the sparse literature that examines the effectiveness of intercultural accommodation and focuses on the combined use of service provider’s language and ethnicity as a means to enhance service quality.

The study delivers cautions for service firms not to generalize the receptivity of intercultural accommodation efforts. Given the increasingly sizable segments of minority customers, this study offers insights for service providers to develop suitable recruitment strategies and training programs when devising effective ethnic targeting strategies.

This research is among the first to explain why the effect of target marketing is not homogenous by expanding the research on intercultural accommodations toward a new context considering service involvement levels among varied minority consumer groups.

This study aims to examine the applicability of key measures of service quality and customer satisfaction in a cross‐cultural setting, first establishing measurement equivalence and then investigating the impact of culture on these measures.

Using scenarios involving a visit to the dentist's office, respondents from Germany, Japan, and the USA participated in a 2 × 2 factorial experiment in which the authors manipulated both expectations (low/high) and service performance (low/high).

Regardless of expectations, when performance was low, the low‐context respondents (USA and Germany) perceived lower quality than did the respondents from the high‐context country (Japan), but gave higher quality ratings than did the Japanese respondents when the performance was high.

The findings of this study highlight the necessity of considering culture when interpreting customer satisfaction ratings.

This research adds credence to the paramount role culture plays in consumers' ratings of perceived service quality and customer satisfaction.

This article aims to identify critical aspects of Chinese‐Western intercultural guanxi relationships that have largely been ignored as a domain for study in international business and industrial marketing, and to suggest a way forward.

A theme analysis across a range of academic and business journal articles is undertaken to capture major themes involving China‐focused research that relates to international business and industrial marketing, and also to locate critical themes that may have been overlooked.

Intercultural interaction at a personal level is both unavoidable and critical for successfully doing business with China. This study introduces the term guanxi gateway ties to highlight a special class of facilitating relationships that can emerge through interactions between guanxi insiders and guanxi outsiders. Insiders and outsiders can meet and work together in this middle‐cultural territory for the instrumental purpose of obtaining passage through the “gateway”.

Inevitably some journal articles of interest may have been missed in the review due to the chosen scanning boundary. Nevertheless the search method provides a sufficient base to reveal recurrent research themes, and also overlooked themes of potential significance.

Guanxi gateway ties assist companies and individual business actors to find a path through the cumbersome Chinese bureaucracy and hierarchical levels by activating personal relationships.

This study reveals a commonly overlooked perspective of guanxi, that is, as a facilitator of culture‐bridging ties. The conventional business perspective of guanxi can be viewed as evolving from a gated community into an intercultural facilitating mechanism.

This study aims to understand better the impact of intercultural communication, social environment and personality on customer satisfaction and post-purchase stage in retailing from Muslim customers’ perspective. In this endeavour, this study illustrates the unique context of intercultural communication to highlight several improvements contributing towards the advancement of intercultural communication literature.

This research adopted a survey approach where 450 questionnaires were obtained among selected grocery retailers in Klang Valley, Malaysia. The measurement of the constructs and their interrelationships were examined based on partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM).

The findings partially validated the proposed framework with statistically significant relationships among all constructs. Furthermore, it exposed additional insights into some practical and conceptual solutions for addressing intercultural communication of religiously and culturally diverse service encounters in the Malaysian grocery retail industry. These contributions postulated an impetus for future research in various service settings.

Based on the theories, this study assessed the role of the social environment and personality of grocery retail customers on intercultural communication competence (ICC). It also examined the impacts of ICC on inter-role congruence and interaction comfort. It is anticipated that by filling this knowledge gap, the research assisted in strengthening retail communication strategies, which require intercultural communication adjustments in a multicultural business environment. ICC is expected to improve the retail industry’s competitiveness when it positively influences inter-role congruence and interaction comfort among customers.

Altering eating habits are leading to an increase in child obesity rates, especially in lower social class. One possible prevention activity is the implementation of a quality label for children's food. Therefore, this paper seeks to investigate parents' food choice criteria in light of social standing to deduce the possible impact of such a quality label.

A total of 15 qualitative interviews were conducted with parents of different social class. Topics discussed were general diets, grocery shopping behaviour and attitudes towards food quality labels.

Results indicate that parents have similar choice criteria independent of their social class, e.g. quality, price, brand and children's preferences. Nutrition panels and quality labels are not of highest importance. Nonetheless, a need for information exists and their involvement in child nutrition seems to determine the possible impact of quality labels.

The qualitative methodology can be seen as a limitation of the study. The influence of involvement has to be further analysed.

Some research on the influence of quality labels in general and on family decision-making when shopping for food and with regard to differences in social class does exist. This study contributes to existing research by combining these research streams.