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The purpose of this paper is to examine the reasons for the lack of research attention paid to the Middle East (ME) and Africa regions. In particular, this study seeks to identify the reasons for and implications of the paucity of ME- and Africa-based studies in high-quality international journals in the marketing field with a specific focus on the challenges in conducting and publishing research on these regions.

The authors conducted a systematic review of the literature on the ME and Africa regions to identify papers published in 23 high-quality marketing, international business, and advertising journals. This search resulted in 301 articles, among which 125 articles were based on primary or secondary data collected from a local source in those regions. The authors of these 125 articles constitute the Delphi study sample. These academics provided input in an effort to reach a consensus regarding the two proposed models of academic research in both regions.

This paper differs from previous studies, where academic freedom emerged as the most important inhibitor to conducting and publishing research. The most frequently mentioned challenges in conducting research in Africa were access to data, data collection issues, diversity of the region, and lack of research support infrastructure. For the ME, the most often described challenges included validity and reliability of data, language barriers, data collection issues, and availability of a network of researchers. Editors’ and reviewers’ low interest and limited knowledge were ranked high in both regions. South Africa, Israel, and Turkey emerged as outliers, in which research barriers were less challenging than in the rest of the two regions. The authors attribute this difference to the high incidence of US-trained or US-based scholars originating from these countries.

To the best of the knowledge, no marketing studies have discussed the problems of publishing in high-quality international journals of marketing, international business, and advertising for either region. Thus, most of the issues the authors discuss in this paper offer new insightful results while supplementing previous research on the challenges of conducting and publishing research on specific world regions.

This special “Anbar Abstracts” issue of the Marketing Intelligence & Planning is split into nine sections covering abstracts under the following headings: Marketing Strategy; Customer Service; Sales Management/Sundry; Promotion; Marketing Research/Customer Behaviour; Product Management; Logistics and Distribution.

Researchers emphasized that only a small effort has addressed the beliefs and attitudes of millennials toward advertising. The purpose of this study is also to respond to researchers’ recognition of the dearth of cross-national advertising and globalization studies in emerging markets. To fill this theoretical gap in the literature, this study aims to assess attitudinal differences and similarities, as well as the underlying structures of the attitude toward advertising in general (AG), of millennial consumers from developed and emerging markets (USA, UK, France, Spain and Morocco).

Data were obtained from millennials through self-administered survey questionnaires. It drew from findings of previous research and theoretical development by Bauer and Greyser, Pollay and Mittal, Sandage and Leckenby, Muehling, Durvasula and Netemeyer, and Andrews, Lysonski and Durvasula. Various statistical analyses were used to explore differences and similarities in AG.

The paper concludes that the two-factor solution framework of AG is inadequate. Research results also indicated that millennials from each of the five different countries studied did not indicate overwhelmingly favorable or unfavorable AG. This study found eight factors/constructs (i.e. promote bad things as good, product information, social role and image, hedonism/pleasure, good for the economy, materialism, falsity and “not interpretable”) as descriptors of the millennials from the five nations’ AG.

The differences in advertising beliefs and attitudes among samples in the five countries studied may be because of such factors as historical values, practices and regulations. Cultural values and dimension may influence millennials’ perceived AG and need to be taken into consideration.

Academicians and practitioners in the advertising field need to appreciate the country’s cultural peculiarities. In understanding the advertising preferences of millennial consumers in these five markets, marketing and advertising executives may have localized their advertising messages for each studied market, resulting in different responses from these millennial consumers.

Millennials need not be conceptualized as a single niche market. While the focus of most of research in the determinants of AG had been within the Western business/consumer construct, the goal is to include assessment of AG in a non-Western, emerging market. This paper addresses the dearth in determinants of AG research in North Africa and other emerging markets.

This special “Anbar Abstracts” issue of the Marketing Intelligence & Planning is split into nine sections covering abstracts under the following headings: Business Strategy; Marketing Strategy; Customer Service; Sales Management; Promotion; Marketing Research/Customer Behaviour; Product Management; Logistics and Distribution; Sundry.

Given the contradictory findings of standardization/adaptation of marketing strategy in explaining export performance in the extant research, this study aims to examine the contingent effects of managerial ties and born global orientation in the standardized advertising-export performance conceptualization.

The study used two-respondent method in the survey research by a sample of 155 exporting firms operating in the industrial marketing based in Australia and New Zealand and applied hierarchical regression analysis to test the hypotheses.

The findings demonstrate that standardized advertising has a significant effect on export performance and this relationship is positively moderated by business ties. Such effect is particularly enhanced for born global firms (than nonborn global firms). However, political ties negatively influence the impact of standardized advertising on performance and such effect is stronger for born global firms.

A broader perspective of contingent variables should be included to examine the underlying relationship between standardized advertising and export performance in capturing the dynamism in international marketing contexts, such as institutional frameworks or sociocultural environments in host countries.

Standardized advertising is critical for born global firms’ export performance as it can increase efficiency and speed up internationalization processes. Such positive impact of standardized advertising on export performance is further enhanced if born global firms allocate resources to develop strong business ties with host country partners instead of building political ties with host country governments, because smooth business networking can facilitate standardized advertising on industrial marketing, yet justifiable political relations require intricate negotiations that often prolong internationalization progress.

This study incorporates managerial ties and born global orientation as contingent factors in fixing the theoretic interlock between standardization advertising strategy and export firm performance.

The purpose of this study is to examine the direct/indirect effects of sustainable competitive advantage (SCA) antecedents (entrepreneurial orientation, marketing capability, innovation capability and marketing innovation) on market performance (MP) in travel agencies.

A survey was used for data collection randomly from 315 managers in travel agencies and structural equation modelling was used for testing research hypotheses.

The findings of this study showed that SCA is a partial mediator between SCA antecedents and MP. SCA antecedents significantly improve the prediction of travel agencies’ MP.

This study offers useful insights to managers, services providers and marketers of travel services who seek to achieve competitive positions and strengthen their marketing and innovation capabilities to support their survival in the travel supply chain in an accelerated technological changeable travel and tourism market.

The literature review lacks an integrated model that investigates the effect of SCA and its antecedents on MP. The introduced research model provides a deep insight into the mediating role of SCA in improving business performance.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how advertising is used by real estate companies as an instrument for managing the adverse effects of a catastrophe.

Through a theoretical analysis, types of post-disaster advertising messages were identified. On the basis of the likely variations in post-disaster advertising, a content analysis was conducted of a sample of 4,150 property print advertisements to identify advertising messages related to the earthquake. Finally, the message changes in these earthquake-related advertisements were evaluated and compared with the dimension of time to explore the development of advertising strategies.

The authors found that 12 types of advertising messages were used by developers in response to the Wenchuan earthquake. The initial advertising strategy was mainly to manage public relations, then the strategy was to reduce or compensate for the increased earthquake risk perceptions of buyers.

The findings provide valuable references for helping enterprises adopt effective advertising messages and strategies to reduce the negative effects of disasters.

There are only a few studies on advertising campaigns, especially in the real estate industry, that have been conducted in the wake of catastrophes. This study sought to expand upon the scarce findings in this particular field.

The purpose of this study is to provide a systematic review of the current state of research regarding mobile social media use for value creation by firms and customers and an agenda for future research.

The authors conducted a systematic review following three main steps: keyword search, study selection and data extraction. A total of 53 articles were identified using academic databases and manual cross-referencing. By means of a thematic analysis method, the study addresses issues related to theory, methods, context, findings and gaps.

The study reviews and illustrates 14 value aspects of the mobile social media and value creation literature. The findings indicate that mobile social media are effective tools for firms to create and capture value from customers and for customers to co-create value.

The study contributes to the marketing and social media literature by proposing a conceptual framework that integrates the core components of value creation by firms and customers in the mobile social media context and by proposing an agenda for future research.

Despite the increasing volume of scholarly work in international advertising, media selection has received very little attention. This study seeks to address three fundamental issues in media selection for non‐domestic markets: the relative importance of cultural factors, the relationships between organization structure, and the relative weight that executives place on cultural and non‐cultural factors in their media selection, and the relationships between cultural orientations of advertising executives and their perceptions of specific non‐domestic factors of media selection.

A mail survey of executives for US consumer durable manufacturers operating internationally was conducted. The sample involved managers responsible for media selection in 106 firms listed in the Fortune directory of the 500 largest industrial multinational corporations (MNCs). Three waves of the same questionnaire were sent. Of the selected executives, 84 returned the questionnaire, making the response rate 79.25 percent.

The findings reveal that advertising executives of US MNCs place more importance on general environmental factors (type of product, target market, budget size, cost efficiency, reach and frequency, and competition) than on specific non‐ domestic factors (media availability, language diversity, legal constraints, level of economy, literacy and cultural considerations). Furthermore, managers in centralized decision firms and managers in decentralized decision firms do not differ significantly in their assessment of the relative importance of general and specific non‐domestic factors. However, non‐culturally oriented managers in contrast to their culturally oriented counterparts place greater importance on media availability when determining and executing media‐selection decisions. The surveyed executives also tend to be more involved in establishing objectives and setting budgets than in designing creative strategies and selecting specific media for international advertising campaigns.

Although localized and globalized marketing campaigns have steadily increased in the last 20 years, very few studies have examined MNC advertising managers' views about media selection. The research adds new insights to the understanding of this critical‐decision process.