Editorial

Citation

Cadogan, J.W. (2012), "Editorial", International Marketing Review, Vol. 29 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/imr.2012.03629faa.001

Editorial

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Marketing Review, Volume 29, Issue 6.

This issue concludes the 29th volume of International Marketing Review, and contains a number of exciting and stimulating papers, together with a somewhat controversial viewpoint piece. The papers touch on a wide variety of issues that are relevant to the international marketing domain, but if there is a unifying theme, it is that all five papers deal directly with cross-cultural research matters: the first four empirical research papers all contain data from or about multiple cultures; the last paper deals with the issue of how culture is conceptualized.

Opening the issue is a paper by Shukla, which continues his theme of research into luxury branding in the international marketplace (e.g. Shukla, 2010, 2011). In this piece, Shukla examines consumer value perceptions across emerging and developed markets, and the influence of these value perceptions on purchase intentions within a luxury goods context. His findings highlight some interesting differences and similarities in the ways that values drive purchase intentions in consumers in developed and emerging markets.

The second paper is by Jiang and Wei, and looks at aspects of international and cross-cultural advertising, issues that are of growing importance to the international marketing community (e.g. Fastoso and Whitelock, 2012; Hatzithomas et al., 2011; Leonidou et al., 2011). Specifically, the authors address the advertising strategies that North American, European, and Asian multinational corporations (MNCs) use in their advertising campaigns in the USA and China, using a content analysis approach. The authors find differences in the extent to which MNCs from different areas in the world pursue global/glocal/local advertising strategies, and speculate as to why these differences are observed.

The third paper is by Soyez, and presents a model of the value-based drivers of environmental concern. Environmental issues are emerging as core issues of interest in the international marketing literature (e.g. Leonidou et al., 2011; Yin and Ma, 2009), and Soyez argues that both individual values and values at the notional cultural level can drive environmental concern. Soyez tests the model with data from a sample of five countries (USA, Canada, Australia, Germany, and Russia) using attitudes to organic food as a context for the research. The findings indicate that pro-environmental value orientations may have a differential influence on attitudes toward organic food and subjective norms to differing extents across the countries analyzed.

Returning to the issue of luxury brand consumption issues, Monkhouse et al. examine the issue of how cultural variables may drive how consumers perceive what luxury means to them. They focus on consumers in East Asia, and draw samples from four countries in that region (China, Japan, Singapore, and Vietnam) in order to test a model of the drivers of consumers’ perceptions of luxury goods. They find that face saving and group orientation are important variables that appear to shape how consumers perceive luxury – and yet they also find that the influence of these values differs across East Asian countries. As a result, the authors suggest that their findings can be of benefit to international marketers in helping them developing appropriate brand positioning strategies, new products and services, and communication and pricing strategies, across the countries sampled.

The final piece in this issue is a viewpoint paper by Brewer and Venaik, who make comment on the ways that researchers use notions of national culture in their research models. The authors argue that national culture variables as operationalized by Hofstede and the GLOBE researchers, for instance, are not valid when transferred to the individual level. They go on to argue that research that extends these national culture level variables to the individual level of analysis may be drawing erroneous conclusions, and suggest that this is quite a common activity. They go on to suggest ways forward in future research endeavors. Their comments are pertinent for international marketers, and may have deep consequences for the ways that researchers go about developing and testing theories involving national culture.

In this issue, we also publish a list of the reviewers who have helped International Marketing Review over the past 12 months. Thank you all. We could not do this job without you.

John W. Cadogan