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Due to the lack of industrywide data, now there is only perceptual knowledge, through survey data, that construction firms may face great challenges in geographical diversification. The article aims to provide an objective description on the state of interregional market entry practices in the Chinese construction industry. How these practices are influenced by related set of regional and industry-related factors is further studied.

Description analysis of the practices is first performed based on a first-hand industrial data set including 1,020 projects and 404 construction firms. Combining provincial panel data in the National Bureau of Statistics of China, related regional and industry-related factors on these practices are further analyzed through hierarchical regression models.

(1) Interregional market entry practices are not quite prevalent during the past two decades, only involving 271 projects and 111 firms which accounts for 26.57% and 27.47% of the analyzed subjects respectively; (2) Large, state-owned and experienced firms are more frequently involved in the practices; (3) A number of regional factors such as local market protection and industry scale also significantly impact the practices.

The empirical analysis of this study was conducted using the specific dataset from the National Quality Award Projects where firms tend to be national, which may limit the generalizability of the findings to the whole industry contexts.

While most of the research on market entry practices in the project-based construction industry is undertaken at project or firm level based on survey data, this research represents an exploratory effort of using objective data to provide a macro overview of the practices at the industry level. The findings could contribute to a deepened understanding of how these practices are impacted by related regional- and industry-level factors.

The construction industries in developing countries can play a significant role in stimulating economic growth. Like many of these countries, the construction industry in Singapore has similarly evolved through an infancy phase to now reach a stage of maturity as the economy braces itself to officially become the first developed nation on the Equator by the end of the 1990s. The influence of the construction industry on the Singapore economy has been the subject of much study. None, however, has shown the stages through which the industry has evolved over the last 25 years, since Singapore gained independence in 1965, nor the role played by the government in rationalising the marketing capacities and level of sophistication among indigenous construction firms. This article seeks to explore the rationale behind the key development policies, strategies and marketing programmes implemented by the Singapore government for the local construction industry.

Most large‐scale construction projects in developing countries used to be dominated by contracting firms from the developed world. This phenomenon was observed in the construction industry of Singapore. However, over the last two or three decades, local contracting firms in Singapore were groomed to take on more sophisticated and complex contracts in the domestic market; Singaporean construction firms are now even exporting their accumulated expertise overseas. Traces the development of the construction industry in Singapore and synthesizes the Government‐led national marketing effort which has collectively provided assistance and encouragement for local construction firms to venture into overseas markets. Construction export marketing at the national level is emphasized. The lessons which can be learned from the Singapore experience would be useful for other developing countries in search of a similar paradigm in economic development and export marketing.

“Competition intensity” is a factor in addressing competitiveness. The understanding on competition intensity is prerequisite to the formulation of industrial competition policies as well as firms’ competition strategies. In the construction context, whereas competition intensity can be measured using a number of traditional approaches (e.g. competitor number, concentration), the measurement is often criticized for poor efficiency. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new model for measuring competition intensity in light of the theory of discriminant analysis.

The proposed model is composed of predictor variables concerned with market operation as well as criterion variables that classify markets into a few predefined groups based on the values of competition intensity. Empirical data of China's local construction markets were collected to verify the proposed model.

The research findings indicate that the model can offset the drawbacks of traditional measures in the construction market.

It is recommended using the proposed model to predict the competition trend of construction market especially when data for the traditional approaches are poor or not readily available.

The proposed model is a development of the literature in examining competition intensity.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) play a pivotal role in evaluating the level of success of an organization in achieving its business objectives. The objective of the current research is to identify and prioritize effective KPIs in branding products and construction projects, which contribute to the success of construction companies in a competitive environment.

The present research is of an inferential, descriptive and survey nature. In this study, we identified the influential key performance indicators of construction companies in branding products and construction projects for success in a competitive environment through a literature review and expert opinions. The data were collected using a questionnaire, and a combination of the one-sample t-test method with a 95% confidence level and the fuzzy multiple attribute decision-making (FMADM) method was employed for analysis.

The results indicate that the most influential key performance indicators for construction companies in branding products and construction projects for success in a competitive environment are, in order of significance, the following indices: “Marketing and Advertising,” “Financial,” “Creativity,” “Technical and Operational” and “Social and Political.”

The present research examines the importance of branding construction products and projects for the success of construction companies by improving their business objectives and utilizing key performance indicators throughout the product lifecycle (production and construction). This study provides solutions on how construction companies can increase their competitive advantage through branding and achieve long-term success in the global construction industry.

At the beginning of the nineties, the Danish construction market was in the midst of a severe slump (Eurostat, 1995). At the same time, the German market was beginning to boom, due to the process of unifying the two German states (European Construction Research, 1995). Because of the poor home market circumstances, many Danish construction industry actors, including individual architects and architectural firms, attempted to find work in Germany (Halskov, 1995). However, the aspirations of most of these actors were dashed. By 1996, many of the largest Danish civil engineering and contracting firms had lost billions of Danish kroner, and a great number of small firms, typically architectural firms or subcontractors in the construction process, had also experienced severe losses, some of which had jeopardized the very existence of these firms (ibid.). This turn of events surprised both insiders in the Danish construction industry and the general Danish population as both groups believed that Denmark has high construction standards and that the most of the firms that had attempted operations in Germany were technically competent and had sound domestic business policies.

Construction companies typically allocate limited resources, i.e. human resources and funds, for marketing activities; so, they commonly face the problem of deciding in which marketing activities they should primarily invest and how much resource they should allocate for the selected marketing activities. Indeed, the problem of selecting the best set of marketing activities should be treated as a multi‐objective optimisation problem with multiple obligatory and flexible goals with different priorities, several interdependencies, and multiple constraints on resources. The main objective of this paper is to solve the problem of optimal allocation of scarce marketing resources using the combination of analytic network process (ANP) and zero‐one‐goal‐programming (ZOGP) models.

The research methodology of this paper mainly involves: reviewing the relevant literature on marketing and construction marketing; identifying the marketing activity alternatives in which construction companies may consider to invest; constructing an ANP model in order to calculate the importance weights of the different marketing activities; formulating a ZOGP model, which uses the weights obtained from the ANP model and considers the obligatory and flexible goals with different priorities, interdependencies and constraints on resources, that enables construction companies to optimize their scarce marketing resources; and conducting two case studies in order to illustrate how the proposed methodology works.

This paper provides construction companies with an integrated decision‐support methodology, which will assist them in allocating their limited marketing resources for different marketing activity alternatives in a more efficient way. The proposed methodology does not only consider the constraints on marketing resources and priorities of the goals that need to be satisfied but also show the deviations from the desired goals.

This paper is of benefit to construction companies as it offers an efficient and convenient tool that allows construction companies to optimise scarce marketing resources.

The external, social, economic and political environments determine the opportunities for work and thereby potential profit. Clients’ needs and attitudes, like the external environment itself, are never static and therefore organizations need to adapt and respond to these fluctuations. Situated between the external and internal environment of an organization and operating at the boundary of the organization is the marketing function. There are many changes occurring in the UK construction industry: a levelling of the trade cycle; methods of placing contracts; increased emphasis on quality, experience and innovations; and increasing competition among firms; clients’ buying behaviour due to changes in the clients’ organization; and developments in technology. Evaluates the role of marketing in seeking to regulate the construction organizations’ relationships with changes within the industry and the external environment.

The construction industry in Australia is a major contributor to the national GDP. In recent years efforts to improve the industry’s performance led to the realisation that the industry needs to be internationally competitive for it to remain viable. This paper examines the nature of the Australian construction industry in the context of the international construction industry. The concept of international trade is also used to explain trade patterns in the construction industry.

Manpower is the most valuable asset in the construction industry. Based on an examination of literature, selected key data sources, and views from 29 key informants, this paper addresses the important labour resource context related to the construction industry in the case of Hong Kong. These include the trends of the critical indicators of the labour market in construction and the implications of the changing markets and technology on the future pattern of skill requirements, and the government policies on construction personnel. The findings are of immense importance to anyone involved in the construction industry, particularly training organizations and policy makers in their mission to maintain a skilled, competitive and adequate workforce able to meet the future demands of the industry. The changing labour market trends and skill requirements pose challenges for construction personnel in terms of upgrading their skills. Further research is recommended to construct robust models predicting the occupational trends in labour resources for effective manpower planning and to establish a labour market information system which could lead to capturing periodic labour market signals with a view to assisting the process of policy making on various human resource development aspects of construction workforce in Hong Kong.