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This paper aims to advance the theoretical knowledge of how manufacturers develop a multisensory value proposition.

An exploratory case study with a global automotive manufacturer was conducted. Personal in-depth interviews with key informants within a manufacturer were performed to obtain in-depth knowledge and insights on how the manufacturer plans and designs a value proposition.

This paper reveals how a value proposition is created from a sensory marketing perspective, which includes orchestrating the sensory experience, harmonising sensory cues to ensure they provide a consistent experience, thereby providing a memorable experience.

Understanding how to offer value might assist managers in tailoring a unique experiential value proposition to position the brand.

This paper proposes a theoretical framework, enriching the understanding of the underlying mechanisms used to create an experiential value proposition. The framework illustrates that harmonising sensory cues based on brand-related stimuli fosters a memorable experience, which enables consumers to (sub)consciously infer value.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize “entry node”, to describe the entry node pattern (i.e. the initial entry node and changes in it) of small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) entering emerging market business networks, and to determine how network nodes are associated with experiential knowledge.

Using data from an on‐site survey based on a standardized questionnaire, hypotheses were tested using ANOVA on 197 SMEs in southern Sweden that entered the emerging markets of the Baltic States, Poland, Russia, or China.

The entry node is the establishment point into a foreign market network. In total, four entry situations are defined – triad via home market; triad via host market; dyad from home market; and dyad at host market – each using different entry nodes. After initial entry, one third of the firms changed their nodes, primarily into a more committed node. Various nodes display significant differences in the level of accumulated societal, business network and customer‐specific experiential knowledge. A more committed node is associated with more experiential knowledge.

Knowledge is complex to measure, since various factors influence the level of accumulated experiential knowledge. This study examines the association between types of nodes and experiential knowledge, but does not aim to explain knowledge accumulation. Perceptual measures are used and possible method biases involved are safeguarded through an on‐site survey method.

This paper conceptualizes the novel concept of entry node, provides insight into the SME node pattern in emerging markets and examines the association between nodes and experiential knowledge.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the establishments of Chinese wholesale and retail market platforms in China and Europe, which create a new take-off route for SMEs from China, and to theorize on this as a new collective route to internationalization.

An exploratory case study has been undertaken covering four Chinese market platforms: the role model in Yiwu, China, and the establishments in Warsaw, Poland; Budapest, Hungary; and Kalmar, Sweden.

A new collective internationalization route is identified, driven by the collectivistic Chinese culture. Here Chinese SMEs diverge from traditionally suggested paths of internationalization, taking off independently from the domestic business network but form a joint market platform in the foreign market. This collective behavior compensates for the resource constraints of internationally inexperienced Chinese SMEs. From the market platform, they plug into the local market network and are provided with economies of scale and scope, ultimately making them internationally competitive. This collective route offers the potential for joint learning and risk reduction when entering distant markets in the early internationalization stages.

For Chinese SMEs, co-location in a market platform in foreign market offers the advantages of lowering institutional distance and uncertainty as the firms collectively handle these matters. A limitation of the study concerns the generalizability, as few cases are studied. Still, being an unstudied phenomena there are important empirical contributions to be made.

The paper reports on an overlooked empirical phenomenon, namely the establishment of Chinese wholesale and retail market platforms in China and Europe. Through this establishment a new collective route into the global market by Chinese SMEs is identified and theorized.

The purpose of the study is to examine the political sources of uncertainty in the internationalization process of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The authors theoretically derived a research model embracing three hypotheses. These hypotheses are tested on a sample of 203 on-site interviewed SMEs. Regression analysis is used to test two individual hypotheses and one interaction effect.

The regression analysis reveals that political knowledge possessed by the firm reduces uncertainty in the internationalization process. Political turbulence is shown to increase uncertainty in the internationalization. The interaction shows that political turbulence obliterates the uncertainty reducing effect by political knowledge.

The authors identifies two main political sources of uncertainty in the internationalization process of SMEs. For managers and business researchers, it is shown that experiential knowledge is useful under stable conditions. When turbulence increases, however, firms need to develop alternative strategies for uncertainty management.

This study is the first to test the uncertainty reducing effects of experiential knowledge in turbulent environments. Thus, by running the interaction between political knowledge and political turbulence, the authors shed new light on the usefulness of previous experiences in the internationalization process.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the understanding of relationships between entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and performance, and between market orientation (MO) and performance in different market contexts that set boundaries for performance.

The paper presents a review of studies containing empirical research incorporating EO, MO, market context and firm performance.

Patterns regarding content of previous studies of the issue are outlined, and crucial research gaps are identified. These concern a lack of focus on relationships between EO/MO and performance of foreign units.

First, further studies on international strategy need to develop EO/MO components that are consistent with foreign units’ value-adding roles. Second, the impact of dynamism originating from competitors in foreign markets needs attention. Third, direct impacts of market dynamism on performance of foreign units, and moderating roles of EO/MO need to be studied.

International competitiveness of the firm as a whole would benefit from higher performance of foreign units that may be achieved through aligning EO/MO with local market contexts.

Meta-analyses show that it is difficult to establish universal direct relationship between EO/MO and performance and that the importance of market context is underestimated. The paper provides opportunities for further studies that may clarify underlying contingency mechanisms.

The literature reports mixed findings on the performance impact of market orientation and a lack of attention to the moderating roles of dyadic competition and firm's age. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between customer responsiveness and performance of industrial firms and to consider the moderators.

Drawing on competitive dynamics literature, a contingency model is developed. Hypotheses were tested on 350 Swedish industrial firms that market clean technology to business customers.

First, the main competitor's cost leadership weakens the positive performance impact of the industrial firm's customer responsiveness. An interpretation would be that it is difficult for product firms to overcome competition based on low costs. Second, the industrial firm's age weakens the positive performance impact of the industrial firm's customer responsiveness. This indicates that the firm's responsiveness advantage diminishes as strategies of competing firms converge.

By adding literature on competitive dynamics the study contributes to theory. The article shows that dyadic competition and firm's age matter for the relationship between customer responsiveness and performance.

The industrial firm may keep an efficient customer responsiveness strategy by reducing its vulnerability to low costs of the main competitor. Also, an ability of developing the content of the firm's responsiveness strategy would favor the strategy uniqueness and efficiency.

The article presents a new model that shows the performance impact of the industrial firm's customer responsiveness, including the moderating roles of the main competitor's competitive strategy and the firm's age. By including the contingencies, the model explains mixed findings in the literature regarding relationships between customer responsiveness and performance.

A multinational firm’s expansion in a foreign market is a key issue of international business. The purpose of this study is to extend the understanding of essential drivers that will facilitate firm’s assessment of alternative modes of sequential expansion.

The study applies the knowledge-based view and explores a multinational firm’s sequential post-entry expansion in a foreign market. Event histories of Swedish industrial firms’ establishments of wholly owned subsidiaries in Germany, the UK and the USA were explored using Cox regression.

Broad market experiences stemming from corporate strategy and deep experiences from the preceding subsidiary increase the likelihood of a sequential investment. Effects of broad experiences are contingent on the context specified by the geographic scope of the firm and its general subsidiary experience.

The study contributes to international expansion theory and integrates sources of knowledge originating from strategy theory and internationalization theory. The study shows that the dual approach is needed to understand international expansion.

In evaluating a further subsidiary investment in a foreign market, the multinational firm is advised to assess whether it possesses enough market experiences to justify the investment. The experiences should be associated with corporate strategy, the previous wholly owned subsidiary and the context specifications identified in the study.

The study is unique, as it addresses the simultaneous impact of broad and deep market experiences. Also, the inclusion of central context specifications makes the study novel.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptually and empirically explore and challenge the dogma of Corporate visual identity (CVI) consistency. The goal is to nuance the current polarized debate of consistency or no consistency.

A qualitative research strategy is employed in this paper. Specifically, the empirical work rests on an interview study with strategists from ten different CVI agencies. The interview transcripts are analyzed using template analysis.

In terms of findings, both empirical and conceptual arguments for and against CVI consistency are presented. Many of these arguments rest on conflicting assumptions of CVI communication, CVI authenticity and CVI management, which all influence the debate of CVI consistency.

CVI practitioners are presented with a more reflective approach to dealing with consistency and hands on examples for inspiration.

This paper offers alternative and more nuanced conceptualizations of CVI consistency. This includes seeing consistency and inconsistency as ends of a spectrum to be balanced rather than mutually exclusive and by differentiating between consistency across platforms and consistency over time – coined CVI continuity. Furthermore, several future research areas that can help to further develop the field of CVI are suggested.

The purpose of this study is to develop a conceptual framework on knowledge loss in a manufacturing sector based on three aspects: likelihood of knowledge loss, critical areas of knowledge loss and relevance of each of these knowledge areas in terms of utilization and alignment with organizational goals and strategy. Such a conceptual framework can be helpful to the practicing managers in understanding the types of knowledge that is lost of a given departing employee and thus deciding on a measure to retain the critical employees or capture their knowledge before they leave.

Using a case study approach, data has been collected from a multinational battery manufacturing company based in Hong Kong. Semi-structured interviews have been conducted and analyzed through CAQDAS ATLAS.ti to generate the themes which were then used to develop the conceptual framework.

The findings revealed that the likelihood factors of knowledge loss in the manufacturing sector include layoffs, retirement, immigration and job change. The critical areas of knowledge loss comprise the knowledge of relationships and networks, especially with the customers and suppliers, the technical knowledge (battery and process technology) and knowledge of management, among others. The relevance of each of these knowledge areas needs to be determined through proper analysis whether these knowledge areas are needed in future projects, up to date and aligned with organizational goals and strategy along with other factors.

Using the developed conceptual framework, managers and executives can identify critical employees in the manufacturing sector and accordingly take some appropriate measures to retain their knowledge. Caution should be taken while applying the findings of this study in other industries and context.

This paper is an attempt to reduce the dearth of empirical studies by exploring knowledge retention in the manufacturing sector, especially in the development of proper conceptual frameworks to assess the potential knowledge loss of employees.