Editorial

Citation

Phau, I. (2008), "Editorial", Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics, Vol. 20 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/apjml.2008.008020caa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics, Volume 20, Issue 3.

This issue maintains the tradition of a fair share of papers compassing the current topics in marketing and logistics, and at the same time reflecting the ever-changing landscape of the business over the Asia Pacific region.

The issue opens with three marketing papers examining the Indian retail industry, the strategic marketing aspects of Chinese manufacturing companies and market orientation in an international joint venture. The other three logistics papers will be discussing logistics service providers, transportation in Thailand and the petroleum supply chain performance.

The first paper discusses the Indian retail sector through investigating consumer attitudes and the effect of situational, consumer, store and product characteristic variables on “out of stock” situations. It is discovered that the shopping attitude of respondent, store loyalty, perceived store prices, store distance, shopping frequency and brand loyalty significantly influenced consumers' attitude towards retail store in out-of-stock situations. The authors suggested that retailers must consider these variables while designing and planning their strategies.

The second paper brings us to the next powerhouse in Asia – China. Specifically it examines the extent of the practice of strategic marketing in Chinese manufacturing firms. Interestingly, the authors are happy to report that the “wisdom of Western World `textbook' strategic marketing” has contributed immensely to the success of these firms. In fact, the importance of marketing is exemplified when findings suggest that higher performing firms are differentiated through better and more marketing.

The third paper investigates international joint ventures in the context of Australian firms and how an organization's orientation would have an impact on its performance.

This study has demonstrated that for firms' engaged in international joint ventures, a market orientation has a more positive relationship with organizational performance, such as customer retention, new product success, average performance and overall performance, than a learning orientation. Learning orientation was found to only have a stronger relationship with returns of investment. There is also the existence of a non-linear relationship between market orientation and performance. Hence it is suggested that firms should concentrate on improving their organizations' overall level of market orientation if they are to improve the level of business performance.

The fourth paper examines a customer-oriented, objectives-based model for evaluating the performance of logistic service providers (LSP) in Taiwan. Findings reflected from the case study showed improved and satisfactory results. Furthermore, the model demonstrated sensitive, accurate and effective manufacturing performance rating results for different achievement levels. The authors purport that the LSP performance-rating model can be applied across various industries and is helpful to manufacturers in selecting and integrating the best LSP.

The fifth paper evaluates the logistics performance of inter-modal freight transportation in Thailand using fuzzy set techniques. Findings revealed that a lack of coordination among modes limit the attractiveness of the inter-modal system. The strengths and limitations of each alternative were benchmarked in accordance to the hierarchical attributes. Furthermore, it is suggested that the model can entail the use of corresponding parameters to improve a logistics system.

Concluding the issue is a study that uses both Analytical Hierarchy Process and Balance Scorecard to evaluate the performance of the petroleum supply chain of SMEs in India. It is found that the four most important perspectives with respect to petroleum supply chain performance are customer, financial, internal business process, and innovation and learning. The factors most important are purity of product, market share and the steady supply of raw material and the use of information technology. The authors noted that the main novelty of the paper is this methodology, as it is very useful in comparing performance of supply chains of different petroleum companies.

I trust that the quality and range of articles in this issue has provided inspiration to fellow researchers. Once again we thank our ad-hoc reviewers for their timely and constructive reviews and to the many authors who have been supporting and contributing to the APJML.

Ian Phau