Journal of International Marketing

Does collectivism influence an individual’s willingness to trust others? Conflicting empirical results from previous research and the role of trust in international marketing make this question important to resolve. The authors investigate this question across cultures and at the individual level with four studies using multiple methods. Study 1 establishes correlational evidence between societal-level collectivism and individual-level trust propensity with results from a multilevel analysis of data from over 6,000 respondents in 36 countries. Study 2 offers an individual-level analysis using the trust game, introducing a more rigorous behavioral outcome variable. Study 3 contributes causal evidence at the individual level based on experiments in both the United States and China and offers evidence of social projection as the explanatory mechanism. Finally, Study 4 demonstrates managerial relevance by using advertising to prime collectivism and assessing its effect on trust in the firm.

The authors propose a conceptual model of the drivers, moderators, and outcomes of a firm's effective import strategy, anchored on the dynamic capabilities and industrial organization theories. Whereas the former theory explains the mechanism through which dynamic capabilities facilitate import strategy effectiveness, which boosts competitive advantage and ultimately enhances financial performance, the latter theory sets the foundation for explaining the contingency role of both competitive intensity and environmental uncertainty on translating effective import strategy into competitive advantage. The model was tested using a sample of 151 small and medium-sized British importers, with results indicating that high levels of certain dynamic capabilities of a generic (i.e., adaptive and entrepreneurial) and import-specific (i.e., source identification and market development) nature are conducive to import strategy effectiveness. Study results also revealed that import strategy effectiveness generates both a product-differentiation advantage and a low-cost advantage, although this is contingent on the degree of competitive intensity and environmental uncertainty prevailing in the importer's home market. Finally, the study confirmed that both productdifferentiation advantage and low-cost advantage have a favorable impact on the importer's financial performance.

Timing a multinational firm's entry into a new country is a pivotal decision with long-term impact on the firm's overall performance; thus, a deeper understanding of the drivers of the decision and their interrelationship can yield significant managerial benefits. The authors explore the mediating role of market potential by decomposing the total effects of the decision's main drivers—macroeconomic attractiveness, market concentration, social heterogeneity, and population density—into direct and indirect effects. These decompositions explain the countervailing effects of some drivers that simultaneously make both positive and negative impacts. The data set encompasses mobile 4G broadband penetration in 130 countries, including market entry timings for 28 international operators in 79 countries. The authors establish the nature of the mediation effect of market potential on the drivers of entry timing. Using early penetration data, they utilize growth mixture modeling to divide the countries into four latent segments. They validate this segmentation using machine learning with the four key drivers as classifiers; the process establishes macroeconomic attractiveness as the predominant classifier. The analysis offers entry-timing guidance at both pre- and postlaunch stages.

The authors investigate how strategic resource decisions—regarding slack resources and strategic marketing ambidexterity—influence the relationship between internationalization and firm performance of emerging-market firms. Drawing on the resource-based view, the authors synthesize two dominant, yet divergent, perspectives that explain the respective resource slack advantages and liabilities in the internationalization literature: the flexible capacity and the efficient capacity perspectives. They also explore the moderating role of strategic marketing ambidexterity, which comprises a bundle of marketing activities covering both exploitation-dominant actions and exploration-dominant actions. The authors empirically examine the hypothesized relationships with data from a sample of 1,683 firm-year observations for the period between 2005 and 2018 and find that distinct forms of resource slack have contrasting effects on the relationship between internationalization and performance. The results provide strong evidence for a positive moderation effect of unabsorbed slack resources and a negative moderation effect of absorbed slack resources on the internationalization–performance relationship. The authors also find a nonsignificant moderating effect of strategic marketing ambidexterity, demonstrating that internationalization results in higher firm performance regardless of the firm’s exploration-dominant or exploitation-dominant strategic emphasis in emerging economies.

International marketing research has demonstrated that research and development (R&D) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) are firm capabilities that can lead to competitive advantages in the international marketplace. A synergy versus trade-off dilemma on the R&D–CSR relationship has emerged as an important topic in the literature. The synergy approach suggests a positive link between R&D and CSR, whereas the trade-off approach suggests a negative link. The authors employ the resource-, institution-, and industry-based views to clarify this dilemma by examining two moderators at the country and industry levels. The authors envision that home-country national philanthropic environment (NPE) influences whether managers should take synergy or trade-off approach because NPE reflects the institutional pressures for firms to be more philanthropic. Further, because research finds that CSR differs between manufacturing and service firms, this industry categorization is hypothesized to moderate the effects of NPE on the R&D–CSR relationship. Estimating a hierarchical linear model with a sample of 888 firms across 15 countries, the authors show that in high-NPE countries, there is an R&D–CSR synergy, and in low-NPE countries, there is a trade-off. Furthermore, these relationships are relevant only within service industries rather than manufacturing industries.