Abstract
Brands and branding are key to achieving competitive advantage in global markets. Yet, brands and their managers are facing new challenges and opportunities in light of numerous trends and disruptions that are changing the landscape of marketing in an international context. The climate crisis, a pandemic, and deglobalization winds—marked by China–West trade tensions, wars, and other trade-related disruptions, to name a few—are challenging branding around the world.
The competitive landscape is also changing drastically. Emerging market firms (EMFs) are continuing their international expansion and are becoming formidable competitors not only with their manufacturing prowess, but also increasingly with their own brands (Chattopadhyay, Batra, and Ozsomer 2012; Kumar and Steenkamp 2013). The success of Huawei, Lenovo, and BYD from China are cases in point. As emerging market brands are succeeding by enhancing their quality, innovativeness, and marketing skills, they are also becoming viable alternatives for more affluent local customers in their home markets. Many are moving up the quality ladder, into masstige and premium positions, biting into the high-margin segments in emerging markets, which used to be safe havens for global brands with their status and quality associations (Özsomer 2012; Steenkamp 2017; Xie, Batra, and Peng 2015).
Consumer attitudes toward brands are also changing. In many parts of the world, consumers are expecting brands to act in a socially, economically, and politically responsible way (Giesler and Veresiu 2014; Vredenburg et al. 2020). Although expectations from all brands are on the rise, consumers are associating a higher ethical burden with global brands relative to local ones (Dimofte, Johansson, and Ronkainen 2008; Holt, Quelch, and Taylor 2004). Rising expectations from brands juxtaposed with rising consumer distrust and caution in evaluating brands (Edelman 2022) is creating a challenging landscape for brand managers to navigate.
Considering these issues, we determined it was time for a fresh look at brands and branding in an international context to generate new research that documents what does and does not work in the 2020s and beyond. Our objective was to encourage the development of new constructs, theories, and methodologies capable of capturing the new realities of brands and branding and suggest new frameworks and theories for academic and practitioner use. We published the call for papers for the Journal of International Marketing (JIM) special issue in October 2021 and encouraged submissions that focus on empirical and theoretical work assessing brands and branding in a global context.
We received 39 papers. We used the high-standard, double-anonymized review process in place at JIM for evaluating submissions. The first three authors of this editorial acted as associate editors and worked together with Kelly Hewett throughout the review process. (The paper coauthored by Özsomer was reviewed only by Petra Riefler and three anonymous reviewers.) The result is this special issue of six articles, with an acceptance rate of 15.38%. We believe these articles provide interesting, valid, and new results and extend our knowledge.
As we detail in Table 1, the six articles in this thought-leading special issue vary in the nature of their contributions and empirical approaches, including interviews, field and online experiments, surveys, and secondary data analysis methods. These articles explore different branding topics and approach branding from different perspectives: examining pricing strategies in entering new foreign markets (Sainam and Bahadir 2024), analyzing brand sponsorship decision-making in an international context (Jensen et al. 2024), utilizing country of origin (COO) as a strategic analytical tool (Rahman et al. 2024), introducing the construct of terroir branding as distinct from COO effects and place branding (Spielmann, Williams, and Kohli 2024), demonstrating how consumers shift their standards in evaluating product-harm crises of global versus local brands (Sayin et al. 2024), and identifying motives underlying consumer preference for foreign and domestic masstige brands (Zhang, Yao, and Yang 2024). They also address different geographies (e.g., China, Bangladesh) and economic development levels (e.g., emerging markets, advanced markets).
Summary of the Special Issue Articles.
Notes: Articles are listed according to their discussion in this editorial.
The following sections introduce the six articles that appear in this special issue on brands and branding in a global context. The main objective is to place these articles in the context of the branding landscape.
The Marketing Mix
Both practitioners and academics are interested in understanding how to manage the marketing mix for their brands across heterogeneous markets and segments. Sainam and Bahadir (2024) focus on the understudied pricing element of the mix. They develop an analytical model to generate prescriptive insights for pricing strategies when EMFs enter new foreign markets. Grounded in the international marketing and organizational learning literatures, their model accounts for local and multinational competition, the influence of COO effects, and the role of organizational learning in foreign markets. Their nuanced findings are very interesting in that when an EMF enters a host market with a local competitor, it could generate higher profits even when charging a lower price than the local competitor. Additionally, Sainam and Bahadir (2024) find that developed market firms enjoy greater profitability than EMFs in foreign markets because of positive COO effects. The authors propose and validate the use of organizational learning as a process EMFs can use to surmount the negative impact of COO effects and achieve greater profitability than developed market firms.
Jensen et al. (2024) focus on the sponsorship element of the communication mix. Analyzing 53 years of data encompassing more than 3,000 Formula One (F1) racing sponsorships across six continents, they identify three distinct eras of F1. They investigate the impact of geographic origin and team performance on sponsorship continuity/dissolution decisions. The sponsored properties offer signals of brand foreignness/localness, COO, and the potential for highly visible achievements. The findings improve understanding of brand partnerships and have important managerial usefulness. For example, their model provides ways to enhance efficiencies in partner prospecting that increase the likelihood of long-lasting brand relationships in international sponsorships.
Ways of Building Strong Brands
Spielmann, Williams, and Kohli (2024) introduce the construct of terroir branding, which is distinct from COO effects and place branding. Terroir brands integrate firm-owned host brands with a collective regional brand, and thus combine the best of two worlds. They utilize the positive associations of certain regions, such as Champagne, France (wines), Biella, Italy (wool), and Vuelta Abajo, Cuba (cigars), to develop global brands while being engaged in responsible actions that influence brand perceptions in the global marketplace. In their article, Spielmann, Williams, and Kohli suggest that terroir brands have three critical features: placial distinctiveness, craftsmanship specificity, and processing traditionalism. Drawing on the resource-based view, coopetition theory, and the concept of moral engagement, the authors identify a virtuous circle of local collective efficacy that supports the location and enables a terroir brand to be seen by global markets as being responsibly sustained. The authors also identify a vicious circle through moral disengagement that can lead global markets to perceive terroir brands as irresponsibly sustained. They identify hazards such as host-brand strength variability, rival set stability, locational ownership, and competitor concentration. Finally, they highlight the importance of local terroir branding using a broad spectrum of place-based characteristics and identify conditions under which terroir branding benefits an individual brand and the wider collective of brands, while sustaining the location. This timely article suggests that a win-win solution is possible, where local craftmanship, traditions, and places are utilized and preserved while creating global desirability and awareness. Not all terroirs may have such positive associations. Future research questions could focus on whether new terroir brands can be created. If so, how, and how long does it take?
How to Manage (Global) Brands When Things Go Wrong?
Recent research in international marketing suggests that perceptions of brand globalness (e.g., worldwide availability) and localness (e.g., local embeddedness) trigger categorization of products under the superordinate mental categories of global/local brands, which carry distinct stereotypical associations (Davvetas and Halkias 2019). Adapting the shifting standards theory from social psychology (Biernat and Fuegen 2001; Higgins and Stangor 1988) to the international marketing context, Sayin et al. (2024) propose and show that the mere designation of a brand as global or local constitutes an important categorization that might trigger the use of different within-category judgment standards, affecting consumers’ reactions to product-harm crises in emerging markets. Because of these shifting standards, the distinct associations attached to global and local brands lead to differential consumer expectations and evaluations for global versus local brands. The authors demonstrate that consumers from emerging markets react more negatively toward a product-harm crisis by global (vs. local) brands. Higher initial expectations for global brands are the underlying cause of this more pronounced consumer response to product-harm failures by global brands: These expectations are higher for global (vs. local) brands on many performance dimensions (high quality, newest technology, brand leadership, high standards, trustworthiness). Interestingly, only the consumer expectations for global brands’ utilization of the newest technologies and for their products being of higher standards lead to more negative consumer reactions following a product-harm crisis. These effects are attenuated for product categories associated more closely with localness, such as food, a finding in line with previous literature (Alden, Steenkamp, and Batra 1999) and for consumers in mature markets. Furthermore, the authors find that consumers with high ethnocentrism appreciate it directionally more when a local brand provides compensation after a product-harm crisis than when a global brand does so.
Emerging Market Consumer Preference for Foreign and Local Masstige Brands
The growing size and spending power of the middle class in emerging markets have led brands to adopt a more inclusive luxury branding strategy, namely, the masstige (mass + prestige) strategy (Wang 2021). Masstige brands (e.g., Coach, Kate Spade, Pandora, Hugo Boss) adopt an affordable luxury approach and reflect a level of luxury where the quality, styles, and prices of items are higher than those of everyday, ordinary products but lower than those of premium and traditional luxury goods in the same category (Das, Saha, and Balaji 2022). In this special issue, Zhang, Yao, and Yang (2024) investigate the effect of socially versus personally oriented motives on consumer preference for foreign and domestic masstige brands. The authors conduct their research in China, the world's largest emerging market. They build on the literatures of COO effects in international marketing and socially versus personally oriented motives (Berger and Ward 2010) in luxury consumption, to show a novel pattern of masstige brand consumption. Instead of always preferring foreign masstige brands (e.g., Coach) as implied in the previous international marketing literature, consumers in emerging markets prefer domestic masstige brands (e.g., Goldlion) when their personally oriented motives are made salient. In contrast, consumers prefer foreign masstige brands when their socially oriented motives are made salient. This occurs because domestic masstige brands better manifest self-focused intangible attributes (i.e., the actual value to please oneself), whereas foreign masstige brands are superior in other-focused intangible attributes (i.e., the symbolic value to impress others).
In addition to having important implications for positioning and pricing strategies of masstige brands in emerging markets, this research points to the increasing relevance of emerging market brands for affordable luxury segments. We expect competition to intensify in the masstige segment as more local brands move up the pricing and positioning ladder.
New Analytical Tools for Managing Brands
The availability and abundance of consumer data present some opportunities for finding valuable variables that help categorize consumers to predict their future behavior. Rahman et al. (2024) utilize signaling theory to identify variables that can help retailers predict future consumer purchase value (CPV). Using Bangladesh and beauty products as the research context, they conceptualize and use “distinctive choice of brand country of origin” (DBCOO) and “country of origin diversity” (COO diversity) as analytical signals to predict CPV. They find that DBCOO in a consumer's purchase history indeed increases CPV and that this relationship is enhanced for high-involvement product categories but moderated curvilinearly by purchase frequency. The COO diversity–CPV link is positive but depicts a negative interaction with both high involvement and purchase frequency. Thus, DBCOO and COO diversity can be used to distinguish high- from low-CPV consumers. Consequently, managers can allocate and differentiate their marketing mixes for these high- versus low-CPV segments.
Issues for Further Research
Having presented briefly the articles in this special issue, we next turn to topics in need of further research. We find it surprising that despite their inclusion in the special issue call, we did not receive papers (or the papers did not make it through the review process) on topics like glocal and hybridized branding strategies; branding in a more nationalistic postglobal world; brand purpose and activism in an international context; branding for the bottom of the pyramid; social and digital branding; brand ecosystems across borders; and global market segmentation/positioning based on factors other than geographic boundaries (e.g., based on cultural values; Batra et al. 2024). The use of AI and the use of machine and deep learning in the management of brands and branding around the world are also emerging areas in need of more research.
Conclusion
The articles in this special issue advance our knowledge on brands and branding in a global context in fruitful ways. There are many people to thank. Without their support, this special issue would not be possible. The first three authors of this editorial would especially like to thank JIM editor in chief Kelly Hewett for her dedication, professionalism, and support in every step of the process. Our special thanks also go to Michelle Kritselis, Jess Barselow, and Karin Horler from the American Marketing Association for their attention to detail and dedication. We would like to thank the authors for submitting their papers and the reviewers for their valuable time and expertise. We hope that these articles stimulate further conversation, discussion, and writing on brands and branding in a global context.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
