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The purpose of this paper is to explain the culture‐driven role and effects of social capital in Japanese‐Western alliances. The authors move beyond narrow conceptualizations of relationship bonding (i.e. positive socio‐psychological aspects such as trust and commitment) to explore the broader role of social capital (e.g. in destructive act recovery processes) in such alliances.

The conceptual paper adopts a theory development approach.

The authors advance a process model and propositions that explain the way social capital networks and processes influence relationship‐based contracting and performance outcomes in alliances with the Japanese.

The study assists international marketers in their efforts to overcome cultural barriers to success in Japanese‐Western alliance relationships.

It can be argued that erosion of Japanese business culture potentially clouds the picture for implementing governance through social capital. The study furnishes managers with an understanding of how to take the cultural context of the partnership into account to build appropriate and productive social capital with Japanese partners.

The study is novel in addressing the issue of how to implement relational bonding mechanisms in complex cultural situations. As a result of cultural erosion, different types of Japanese partner, eroded versus traditional, may require different alliance screening and management strategies.

The paper aims to analyse bottom of the pyramid (BoP) customers’ (e.g. Bangladeshi farmers) use and appropriation of mobile telephony and to critically identify a suitable research strategy for such investigation.

Concentrated ethnographic immersion was combined with both methodological and investigator triangulation during a four-month period of fieldwork conducted in Bangladeshi villages to obtain more robust findings. Concentrated immersion was required to achieve relatively speedier engagement owing to the difficulty in engaging with respondents on a long-term basis.

The farmers’ use of mobile telephony went beyond the initial adoption, as they appropriated it through social and institutional support, inventive means and/or changes in their own lifestyle. The paper argues that technology appropriation, being a result of the mutual shaping of technology, human skills and abilities and macro-environmental factors, enables users to achieve desired outcomes which may not always be the ones envisaged by the original designers.

The paper contributes to two major areas: first, it identifies technology appropriation as an important and emerging concept in international marketing research; second, it suggests a concentrated form of ethnographic engagement for studying technology appropriation in a developing country context.

A good understanding of the dynamic interplay between users’ skills and abilities, social contexts and technological artefacts/applications is required in order for businesses to serve BoP customers profitably.

The paper presents a dynamic model of technology appropriation based on findings collected through a pragmatic approach by combining concentrated ethnographic immersion with methodological and investigator triangulation.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the following questions: Are supply chains global or regional? What are the performance implications for firms?

This paper classifies 183 large North American firms into home‐region oriented, host‐region oriented, bi‐regional, and global firms by using geographic distributions of their upstream and downstream activities. The performance implications of the regional supply chains of a broader set of 273 firms by using Tobin's Q and data on intra‐regional sales or assets are further evaluated.

It is found that the evidence to support the regional nature of supply chains – that is, over 85 percent of firms in our sample – have their supply chains within North America. The paper also finds that a regional focus of firms in terms of sales contributes to improved performance as measured by Tobin's Q.

The regionalization perspective proposed by Rugman and Verbeke to develop and test the regional nature of supply chains is applied.

The paper aims to demonstrate the utility of qualitative research for: understanding differences in brand image across markets; the critical assessment of marketing theory; informing revisions to quantitative scales and metrics used in international branding research. This is accomplished via research on a particular case (socialist era brands in Croatia and Serbia).

A total of 12 focus groups, cutting across two countries (Croatia and Serbia) and three age groups (18-21, 35-45, pensioners), were conducted. The contemporary brand images of labels from the socialist era were compared against competing products (launched in the post-socialist period by local manufacturers and those from transnational companies).

Analysis revealed significant differences in the image of the socialist era brands between their home and foreign markets. Variations are linked to a cultural context of newly (re)emerging states with high ethnocentrism, animosity and uneasy political relationships. Transnational brands, however, appear immune to much consumer ethnocentrism.

Firms from the region face significant barriers to creating standardised brand images across the successor states of the Socijalistička Federativna Republika Jugoslavija. While strong in their home markets, the socialist era brands are rarely suitable platforms for international market entry in the region. The dangers of conflating “Western” with foreign in international branding research are documented.

The case illustrates the role qualitative research can play in understanding variations in perceived brand image across international markets. It evaluates the utility of Kapferer’s approach to brand identity. The concept of origin hierarchies is introduced and the inadequacies of international marketing research that relies on a simple domestic versus foreign dichotomy are documented.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate advertising appeals and cultural values in television advertisements from newly emerging markets. Specifically, the paper hypothesizes that the advertising appeals in the advertisements of sub‐Saharan African (SSA) emerging consumer markets (ECMs) with higher level of economic development (South Africa) will reflect more hedonic appeals than the ones from SSA ECMs with a lower level of economic development (Ghana). The paper also developes hypotheses in relations to Munene, Schwartz, and Smith's cultural value framework in SSA.

The research approach used in this paper, entails a combination of qualitative and empirical content analysis of 505 unduplicated advertisements from Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa. Content analysis technique is appropriate if the paper is focused on testing how environmental trends (e.g. cultural values, economic situations, etc.) impact the content of sampled advertisements from different regions of the world (Holbrook, 1977).

The paper reveals some global advertising appeals. The findings from the paper also suggest that the advertisements from SSA are homogenous in terms of the use of the cultural values underlying the conservatism dimension and heterogeneous with respect to the use of the cultural values underlying the hierarchy dimension.

The paper uncovers important dimensions that can be employed in implementing standardized and localized advertising programs in SSA.

The paper identifies novel categories of cultural values (e.g. hospitality) in the television commercials from SSA.

The purpose of this paper is to position multinational companies on a linear continuum indicating their overall attitude towards standardisation/adaptation, examines the reasons influencing multinational companies' tactical (7Ps – marketing mix) behaviour towards it, and finally presents the underlying managerial implications of the results.

A rating scale Rasch model is used in order to place the multinational companies' attitude towards standardisation and adaptation on a linear continuum. Structural equation modelling is subsequently used in order to investigate the relationship between the adaptation and standardisation variable against other variables. An extensive literature review is also undertaken to provide the theoretical foundation.

The paper corroborates the findings of past research by placing multinational companies on a linear continuum; by identifying their overall attitude towards adaptation/standardization; and by describing the relationship between AdaptStand and other variables. Furthermore, it categorises the reasons pulling towards adaptation or standardisation into “significant” and “peripheral”; and provides valuable insights towards practical application.

The paper provides marketing researchers and practitioners with an overview of the main factors that influence marketing tactical behaviour in international markets. Additionally, the research transcends descriptive analysis to identify vital behavioural issues and to prescribe marketing approaches regarding internationalisation.

Though the subject of “adaptation versus standardisation” has been extensively researched, this paper provides original work through in‐depth quantitative analysis of a sufficient sample of multinational companies. The paper reaches specific and explicit conclusions that scientifically test existing theory on the subject, categorise factors according to their significance in the adaptation/standardisation decision process and offer valuable prescriptions of marketing tactics based on the findings.

Our understanding of the drivers of information sharing in export supply chains (ESCs) in general, and in agri-food ESCs in particular, remains scarce. In response, the authors’ paper seeks to explore the drivers of information sharing between two key members of an agri-food ESC (producers and exporters) in Jordan and investigate the link to export performance.

The authors use a two-stage qualitative approach. They initially interview seven ESC experts and a comparative case study across ten producer-exporter relationships follows. The latter involves 40 interviews (four per case) with producers and exporters in these relationships, supplemented with archival material and non-participant observation.

Specific transaction, relationship and network drivers are found to support information sharing in these relationships and information sharing is linked to export performance. In higher performing cases, information sharing is triggered by integration-focused drivers, where the emphasis is on long-term and joint planning, based on sharing wider types of information. In lower performing cases, information sharing is triggered by more individualistic drivers and producers and exporters are sharing logistics-related information with a short-term perspective.

This study extends current literature by identifying how different drivers influence information sharing in producer-exporter relationships and are linked to differences in export performance.

Sex appeal has been widely used in most countries. However, little is known about consumers' responses to sex appeal advertising in different cultures. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of sex appeal on ad and brand evaluation among Australian, Chinese and US consumers.

The paper adopted a three (Australia, China and the USA) × two (male or female model) × two (low or high level of sex appeal) between‐group factorial design.

Australian, Chinese and US consumers have significantly different attitudes when exposed to the same ad. However, consumer buying intentions towards the advertised brand are not significantly different. Despite the general assumption that Chinese consumers might react least favourably to sex appeal ads, this paper finds that they hold similar attitudes towards sex appeal ads as US consumers and even more favourable attitudes than Australian consumers. Product involvement is found to be a significant covariate.

The sample includes young consumers, who may be more tolerant to sex appeal advertising than older generations in China. A similar situation may exist in Australia and the USA.

Understanding how consumers in different cultures respond to different advertising appeal strategies is important for international advertisers.

This is the first reported empirical study that compares Chinese consumers' responses to sex appeal advertising with those in Western countries. Findings add to the understanding of the standardisation‐localisation debate.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether differences exist between born global (BG) firms and international new ventures (INVs) in respect of their performance in overseas markets. These terms have arguably been used as interchangeable to characterise firms that internationalized rapidly, typically but not exclusively within three years of their business start‐up. The term “global” suggests firms have a presence in at least the world's triad regions and arguably a commitment spread across them. INVs, however, may have internationalized quickly to address opportunities but without necessarily a global presence.

The methodology in this exploratory study employs both quantitative but also primarily a qualitative methodology involving 21 technologically oriented small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) based in the UK. This methodological approach is used to assess the strategies used by the two types of firms after their start‐up phase and the factors that shaped their international trajectory and performance.

The findings provide some initial understanding of the two types of firms' patterns of internationalization and more specifically suggest foreign market strategies can be formulated in various ways, i.e. some planned and others by serendipitous means, but that BG and INVs exhibit different characteristics. BGs focused globally in comparison to the more regional focus of INVs.

The implication of the findings is to suggest that researchers should not use the terms interchangeably to characterise different types of firms and behaviour.

The main aspect of originality is to offer insights into managerial practices of different types of firms that have to date been viewed in some studies as representing the same international marketing behaviour.