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The purpose of this paper is to highlight the challenges of Nigerian Professional Football League teams at the club level, with a view to aligning this with developments at the country level, and especially so in the aftermath of the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil – an international event – where Nigeria participated alongside four others – Algeria, Cameroon, Ghana and Ivory Coast.

The meta-analysis adopts a qualitative research approach, drawing upon a review of secondary data sources and the observation technique.

Although Nigeria’s first team players ply their trade in Europe, there remains a challenge epitomised by the “disconnect” between the domestic league and the national team composition. As a consequence, brand ambassadors are proposed as one of the key conduits for re-aligning the identified disconnect.

The dual focus on club level and a single country – albeit in the light of Nigeria, former African champions, poses a limitation as the domestic league in that country may not be representative of others across the continent. However, some insight is also derived from developments in another African football giant – i.e. Ghana, runners-up of the recently concluded 2015 African Nations Cup.

In the long history of the FIFA Football World Cup, only three African teams have ever reached the quarter-finals – notably Cameroon in 1990, Senegal in 2002 and Ghana in 2010. Although the Super Eagles relished the label of African Champions going in the World Cup finals, they remain incapacitated, having failed to “fly” into the round of 16 since their 1994 debut. Furthermore, the alignment at the micro or club level to the meso or country level remains to be investigated at both scholarly and policy levels.

There are success stories on the management and development of football in Africa and as the case of Nigeria demonstrates, Stephen Keshi, the national coach, symbolises missed opportunities – i.e. brand ambassadors – to increase visibility and engagement with the domestic league.

This is one of the very few studies that have sought to highlight the misalignment between club and country within the research context of Africa. It is also one of the few papers that have called on the need for brand ambassadors as a means of bridging the gap in this area.

This paper aims to evaluate the working relationship between accounting and marketing, exploring the nature and antecedents of their integration and consequences on firm performance.

The methodological approach in this study is twofold. First, a review of literature is used to identify core antecedents in the body of literature. Subsequently, four exploratory case studies were used in examining the antecedents of accounting–marketing integration from a frontier market perspective.

This study identifies information sharing and involvement as core elements of accounting–marketing integration; cultural diversity and management mechanisms (policy, structural and procedural justice) as antecedents of accounting–marketing integration; and country of origin as a mediating factor on the extent of association of some variables on their integration. Finally, this study establishes that there is a positive association between accounting–marketing integration and organisational performance.

This study has two major limitations. First, it is qualitative and based on a review of literature and evidence from four case studies. Second, it explored only the less developed country context. Future research should, therefore, aim to address these gaps.

This study draws attention to the fact that accounting and marketing are culturally diverse, and strategic managerial mechanisms must be used to maintain a relevant and effective level of information sharing and involvement towards enhancing organisational performance.

Using exploratory case studies to support the development of a framework, the authors contend that organisations would optimise organisational performance if due attention is given to both information sharing and involvement dimensions of integration, as well as appropriate managerial mechanisms adopted in managing their relationship.

Using a single case study of The Global Soap Project, a social enterprise founded by an African Immigrant resident in the USA, this study aims to explore and posit how lives could be saved in Sub-Saharan Africa and especially so in light of the Ebola pandemic ravaging swathes of West African communities.

The qualitative study interrogates both the identity of a diasporic social entrepreneur in an attempt to develop a framework that links this concept to community entrepreneurship using a single case study.

With hindsight, The Global Soap Project has much to offer in terms of “saving lives” in these communities, as the battle against the Ebola virus calls for containment measures.

While arguably limited in terms of being a single case, this study furthers the understanding on the role of social entrepreneurship in complementing community efforts and coping strategies for tackling pandemics such as the Ebola virus.

Evidently, while vaccines are being fast-tracked, the spread of the virus can be curtailed through personal hygiene, and the project illustrates how an individual social enterprise can be leveraged at the community level.

The study provides avenues for future research enquiry into how single cases might be transformed into multiple cases, both within and across sectors, for the benefit of humanity in general and affected communities in particular.

The purpose of this study is to establish, drawing upon the indirect effects of customer reactance from an emerging economy perspective, the marketing implications of policy induced Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) in Financial Services.

The study employed a quantitative research approach, relying on data from 517 customers of M&A banks in Ghana. Purposive sampling technique was used in selecting respondents for the study. Hypotheses were tested using a structural equation modelling.

A positive and significant relationship between immersive marketing communication and consumer intention is revealed in the study. The presence of consumer reactance highly influenced the relationship. As a public policy tool, forced mergers and acquisitions was found to increase customer reactance. However, when customers are frequently engaged with relevant and consistent marketing communications through appropriate channels, such reactance would only be partial.

Although some of the information were collected, they were not the main focus of our analysis. We acknowledge, from the sample demographics perspective, the study did not consider certain other confounding factors that could influence customers' decisions to remain or switch such as customers' level of banking, type of account, income level, banking experiences in relation to service fees, online banking etc., as these could also potentially influence customers' reactance. Perhaps these may have to be considered in future studies.

When timely and relevant marketing communications are targeted at the customers who are directly impacted by the M&A process, they would experience reactance, but only partially. This has a range of marketing implications for policy-induced M&A and its impact on consumer intention, reactance and attitudes towards the new entity.

The marketing of financial services literature has been silent on the implications of M&A from a policy induced perspective. This study, therefore, contributes to theory by highlighting that the “destruction” of brand value of the affected firms is relatively high in a policy induced M&A and thus increases the level of customer reactance. This is because a regulator enforced M&A, as public policy, usually generates high public interest and public discourse, leading to a heightened customer reactance. However, when immersive marketing communications are targeted at the customers directly impacted by the M&A, they would experience reactance, but only partially.

The transition from multichannel to omnichannel retailing requires a better conceptualisation, especially for customer experience in smart shopping malls. Therefore, this study aims to propose a theoretical model that captures customers’ omnichannel experiences in smart shopping malls in terms of personal interaction, physical environment and virtual environment encounters. It examines the mediating role of flow experience on the relationship between the three types of encounters and customers’ intention to revisit smart shopping malls.

The study draws on four key theories: the service encounter model, trust-commitment theory, flow theory and experiential value theory. A total of 553 completed questionnaires were collected from customers (millennials) in the United Kingdom (UK). The data was analysed using partial least squares-structural equation modelling.

The findings show that physical environment encounters and personal interaction encounters play a significant role in customers’ omnichannel experiences in smart malls. Also, of significance are the following aspects of virtual environment encounters: interface design, personalisation, trust, privacy, consumer–peer interaction and relationship commitment. The findings highlight the significant mediating role of flow on the relationships between these three types of encounters and intention, and the effect of flow on omnichannel service usage in smart shopping malls.

The research contributes to the existing literature by proposing a conceptual model: the smart shopping mall omnichannel customer experience (SSMCE) model. The findings offer practical guidance to shopping malls and retailers who wish to enhance the customer omnichannel experience.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the motivations underpinning the foreign direct investment (FDI) activities, including the location and entry mode decisions, of nascent multinational enterprises (MNEs) from West Africa.

This research adopted a case study approach entailing the triangulation of interview data with documentary evidence on two leading West African financial service companies that have FDI footprints in over 50 country markets.

Evidence suggests the primacy of market-seeking motivations in explaining the FDI activities of the explored nascent MNEs, with relationship, efficiency and mission-driven motivations emerging as strong sub-themes. Having neither the global resonance of their traditional counterparts nor the government-augmented resource profile of their Asian counterparts, the study firms appear to have shied away from costly strategic asset and prestige-seeking FDI, and preferred psychically and institutionally proximate sub-Saharan African markets and non-organic collaborative entry modes.

The above insights should be considered tentative given the study’s limited evidence base. This underscores the need for a larger scale empirical effort to assess the propositional inventory outlined at the end of this paper.

Africa’s growing population of MNEs are urged to continue to strengthen their positions across African markets, view these regional markets as a platform to learn and upgrade their capabilities for future expansion into more challenging global markets, and to augment their limited resource profiles, including by tapping into their global diaspora networks. Policy makers should support their market-seeking initiatives given evidence that they could be a pathway to higher order FDI motivations. This evolutionary approach reflects enduring lessons from earlier generations of MNEs. Policy makers should also support continuing intra-African investment flows as a pathway to creating more sizeable, integrated African markets and generating positive spill-overs, including in typically blind-sided post-conflict or fragile African markets. This also entails pushing for cross-border regulation needed to minimise the transfer of systemic risks across countries.

The study provides rare empirical evidence on hitherto neglected MNEs from sub-Saharan Africa, thus extending the geographic compass of research on FDI motivations. It identifies some distinctive aspects of the explored MNEs’ FDI behaviour, including the previously unheralded mission-driven motivation, whilst also revealing shared characteristics with traditional MNEs and emerging market multinational enterprisess.

The main purpose of this chapter is to interrogate the regulatory environment in Africa by exploring trends and developments within key intellectual property rights agencies and highlighting some of the challenges revolving around contracts enforcement and royalty payments. In many developing countries, the performance and competitiveness of the creative industries have suffered from weak institutional capacity and a spate of copyrights infringement. This chapter highlights a few case illustrations drawing upon the World Intellectual Property Organisation surveys covering a selection of African countries between 2011 and 2020.