Search results

The purpose of this paper is to address the issue of the implementation of international advertising strategies by first introducing a framework of four options that multinational enterprises (MNEs) can use to implement such strategies and second by drawing on contingency theory to develop and test hypotheses relating to how environmental factors and company characteristics affect such implementation.

Hypotheses are tested using web‐survey data obtained from 182 Latin American managers based in the Mercosur trading bloc.

Findings show that the choice of implementation process option is contingent on the environmental factor, cultural homogeneity and the company characteristics subsidiary size and MNE country‐of‐origin, yet not on regional economic integration.

This exploratory study contributes to advertising theory by offering an alternative approach to the consideration of the international advertising standardization question that focuses on the implementation of strategies rather than on their development. The findings further confirm the theory of regional multinationals in the context of international advertising decisions.

The study presents practitioners with four distinct approaches to implementing their international advertising strategies as well as with clear guidelines as to how managers should implement those strategies depending on the specific benefits of standardization they want to achieve.

To the knowledge of the authors, this study is the first to specifically address the implementation of international advertising strategies.

Examines differences in emotional and rational advertising appeal use across experiential and utilitarian services for 11 culturally diverse countries. Pooled across countries, rational appeals were found to be more dominant in utilitarian service advertising, while emotional appeals were used more heavily in experiential service advertising. On a country by country basis, utilitarian service advertisements consistently used a larger number of rational appeals, and experiential service advertisements contained more emotional appeals. Finally, culture appeared to influence the use of appeals more when the appeals were important to the service selling premise. That is, more variation across cultures was observed for emotional appeal use in experiential service advertising, and more variation was observed for rational appeal use in utilitarian service advertising.

Consumer scepticism about the credibility of green advertising around the world is growing. The article aims to provide a comprehensive assessment and trend analysis of green advertising practices of international firms over a 20‐year period.

The study identifies 473 international green advertisements during the 1988‐2007 period and content‐analyses them on five major axes: advertiser profile, targeting features, message aspects, copy characteristics, and situation points.

The content analysis reveals significant trends in all major areas examined and identifies important interaction effects between certain dimensions of green advertisements.

The findings could be augmented by combining them with changes in the external environment, input from consumers about advertising effectiveness, the views of advertisers and advertising agencies, and secondary data referring to the performance of the specific company/product advertised.

Green advertising research mainly focuses on domestic rather than international advertisements; examines important issues in isolation from other issues; partially analyses message, copy, and situation characteristics; and covers a short period. This study fills these gaps by systematically evaluating international green advertisements over a long period and using an integrated framework of analysis that is based on the extant literature. It also explores potential interaction effects between key dimensions describing these advertisements.

The aim of this study was to investigate the extent that consumers prefer the localised packaging over standard packaging, and how the differences may vary across different product types. An ongoing debate facing marketers is whether marketing approaches should be localised as international brands enter foreign markets. In practice, international brands often localise their packaging when sold in foreign markets. This research questions whether and under what conditions is this practice beneficial to foreign brands.

The experiment used a 2 (product type: hedonic versus utilitarian) × 2 (packaging design: standard versus local) factorial designs. Product type was within-subjects, and packaging design was between-subject to minimise learning effects. For each product type, two product categories were used.

Overall, the results show that the role of packaging is more pertinent for hedonic than for utilitarian products. For hedonic products, participants preferred the standard packaging to the local packaging and brand likeability is also rated more positively in their standard package. However, there were generally no significant differences in rating between standard and localised packaging likeability and brand likeability for utilitarian products. The results for the choice decisions were similar to those for the likeability ratings across both product types.

A better understanding into how consumers perceive these packaging strategies would help international marketers operating in local markets.

Although past studies on international marketing communications have investigated standardisation and localisation of messages in the context of advertising using foreign and local cues, none have examined this issue with packaging. This study also extends past research by examining the differential effects of localisation on hedonic versus utilitarian products.

Challenging assumptions about the uni-nationality of markets, the paper aims to understand the role of intra-national cultural heterogeneity in product standardisation and adaptation strategies of multinational firms in a single-country, multicultural market.

The study is set against the dominant backdrop of deductive reasoning in the field and adopts a qualitative mode of inquiry that promotes empathy with the setting. Through a multiple case study approach among paradigmatic cases, it sheds light on the aforementioned objective.

The paper conceptualises the term “layers of adaptation” and reveals that firms use multi-dimensional standardisation/adaptation configurations. It explicates sub-contextual variations that move beyond assumptions of intra-national sameness and identifies their influence on unnoticed, more agile forms of adaptation.

Findings are limited to the analysis of practices in a specific setting. More studies across diverse contexts are necessary in order to expand the boundaries of relevant investigations and enrich the process of theorising.

The findings caution that lack of internal sameness in multicultural markets may necessitate a multi-layered standardisation/adaptation logic that considers varying “depths” and “breadths” of relevant marketing strategies.

The paper challenges assumptions that have characterised the standardisation and adaptation discourse, conceptualises the term “layers of adaptation” to denote the need for more considerate market responses and highlights the usefulness of qualitative investigations towards theoretical grounding of the field.

This special “Anbar Abstracts” issue of the Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing is split into seven sections covering abstracts under the following headings: Marketing strategy; Customer service; Sales management; Promotion; Product management; Marketing research/customer behavior; Sundry.

This special “Anbar Abstracts” issue of the Journal of Product & Brand Management is split into six sections covering abstracts under the following headings: Marketing strategy; Customer service; Pricing; Promotion; Marketing research, customer behavior; Product management.