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This special volume of Advances in International Marketing is devoted to exploring new perspectives on international service marketing – a topic of great interest to scholars and practitioners of international marketing. It is guest edited by Pieter Pauwels and Ko de Ruyter, both of Maastricht University.

The first chapter by Pieter Pauwels, Paul G. Patterson, Ko de Ruyter, and Martin Wetzels is entitled “The Propensity to Continue Internationalization: A Study of Australian Service Firms”. The authors build on the process theory of internationalization and the theory of planned behavior and investigate a firm's propensity to continue internationalization. They develop a theoretical model and test this using structural equation modeling using a sample of international service providers using partial least square (PLS). Their model confirms the pivotal role of attitudes towards internationalization, relevant behavioral norms, and behavioral control factors as contributors to the propensity to continue internationalization.

Today, services officially represent more than 22% (or about USD 3 trillion) of world trade and are the fastest growing sector of world trade for the last two decades (OECD, 2004; WTO, 2001). Optimist analysts believe that services will reach 50% of world trade by 2020 (Hibbert, 2003). Nearly half of the 100 biggest multinationals are service firms with an average revenue of over USD 50 million in 1997 (Hibbert, 2003; Keillor, Hult & Kandemir, 2004). The American McKinsey and Company in management consulting, the Danish ISS in facility management and the Dutch VNU in business information illustrate how service firms may succeed in gaining and holding a global dominant position. On top of the official service economy, the (hidden) service component of product markets is responsible for a major and increasing part of the total value of the world merchandise trade (Brown et al., 2001; Grönroos, 1990). Illustrative in this respect is the critical role of the global service systems of the Swedish/Swiss ABB in automation technology and of the American Caterpillar in construction and mining equipment.

Building information modeling (BIM) is most often used for the construction of new buildings. By using BIM in such projects, collaboration among stakeholders in an architecture, engineering and construction project is improved. To even further improve collaboration, there is a move toward the production and usage of BIM standards in various countries. These are typically national documents, including guides, protocols, and mandatory regulations, that introduce guidelines about what information should be exchanged at what time between which partners and in what formats. If a nation or a construction team agrees on these guidelines, improved collaboration can come about on top of the collaboration benefits induced by the mere usage of BIM. This scenario might also be targeted for interventions in existing buildings. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In this paper, the authors investigate the general content and usage of existing BIM standards for new constructions, describing specifications about BIM deliverable documents, modeling, and collaboration procedures. The authors suggest to what extent the content in the BIM standards can also be used for interventions in existing buildings. These suggestions rely heavily on literature study, supported by on-site use case experiences.

From this research, the authors can conclude that the existing standards give a solid basis for BIM collaboration in existing building interventions, but that they need to be extended in order to be of better use in any intervention project in an existing building. This extension should happen at: data modeling level: other kinds of data formats need to be considered, coming from terrestrial laser scanning and automatic digital photogrammetry tools; at data exchange level: exchange requirements should take explicit statements about modeling tolerances and levels of (un)certainty; and at process modeling level: business process models should include information exchange processes from the very start of the building survey (BIM→facility management→BIM or regular audit).

BIM environments are not often used to document existing buildings or interventions in existing buildings. The authors propose to improve the situation by using BIM standards and/or guidelines, and the authors give an initial overview of components that should be included in such a standard and/or guideline.

Although built to explain an inherently dynamic process, current theories of internationalization are criticized for having limited dynamic qualities. To come to this conclusion, we adopt international market withdrawal as an empirical extreme. We expect dynamic theories of internationalization to be able to accommodate and explain international market withdrawal within the scope of the internationalization process of the firm. An integrated global strategy framework is presented as a promising point of departure toward this aim. To assess this framework's dynamic qualities, we compare it with the ‘stages’ models of internationalization and the transaction-cost based international business theory. Although this integrated global strategy framework — and especially the resource-based part of it — seems to outperform these two established theories, the framework is not capable of fully explaining the dynamics in the internationalization process of the firm. Moreover, the integrated global strategy framework struggles with the paradigmatic incompatibilities among its fundamental explananda. Adopting the resource-based perspective as a pivotal point, we propose an (emergent) resource-based evolutionary theory of the firm as a dynamic framework that is capable of explaining international market withdrawal and the internationalization process of the firm.

To investigate a firm's propensity to continue internationalization, the so-called Uppsala internationalization process model is a logical point of departure (Johanson & Vahlne, 1977, 1990). Building upon a behavioral theory of the firm (Cyert & March, 1963) and Penrose's (1959) theory of the growth of the firm, the basic logic of the Uppsala or U-model is quite straightforward: The allocation of resources to foreign activities holds a certain risk yet induces experiential learning, which results in market-specific knowledge. The increasing stock of market-specific knowledge reduces this risk and stimulates additional allocation of resources (Eriksson, Johanson, Majkgård, & Sharma, 1997).

The first objective was to find out to what extent consumers reveal an effect of strategic and tactical cause‐related marketing on brand loyalty. Second, the article seeks to assess the moderating role of consumer involvement with a product on the relationship between cause‐related marketing and brand loyalty.

An experimental design with 240 participants was used.

The results show that consumers perceive a significantly enhanced level of brand loyalty as a result of strategic cause‐related marketing as long as the firm has a long‐term commitment to this campaign and the campaign is related to a low involvement product. Consumers do not exhibit a significant impact of tactical cause‐related marketing campaigns – whether related to high or low involvement products – on brand loyalty.

First, all respondents were students from a western European university. Second, the experiment relied on imaginary storyboards. Third, the program dimensions were not manipulated separately.

If companies intend to increase brand loyalty through CRM they should set up long‐lasting CRM campaigns linked to the product that shows the lowest level of consumer involvement.

The added value of this paper is the link between cause‐related marketing programs and brand loyalty. Moreover, a distinction is explicitly made between tactical and strategic CRM programs.