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International Marketing Review

ISSN: 0265-1335

Online from: 1983

Subject Area: Marketing

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Editorial

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Article citation: Jeryl Whitelock, (2008) "Editorial", International Marketing Review, Vol. 25 Iss: 1, pp. -

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Editorial

Happy 25th Birthday to IMR! This is a milestone in the development of the journal which we will be celebrating over the coming year.

I begin this first editorial of volume 25 with three pieces of news. I am very sorry to report that Professor Rob Morgan, who has worked with me on IMR, first as Deputy Editor and more recently as Co-Editor, for some six years has decided to step down owing to other work commitments. Rob has been an enormous help in pursuing our aim of maintaining and enhancing the quality and reputation of IMR as a leading, internationally ranked journal in the field of international marketing and he will be greatly missed. So thank you, Rob, from all the team, past and present, and especially from me for all your support. I am delighted that Rob has agreed to stay on as a member of our Editorial Advisory Board (EAB).

I am, however, pleased to report that Professor John Cadogan, of the University of Loughborough, UK, has agreed to join me as Co-Editor with effect from volume 25. He began working with Rob and I on the changeover in November 2007 and has already proved to be a great asset to the journal. John is well-known as a scholar of international standing and we welcome him wholeheartedly to the IMR team.

We are also pleased to say that IMR has been added to the list of journals supported by Manuscript Central. We have been looking forward to this opportunity to offer our authors a more streamlined, efficient and transparent reviewing process – but we would ask you to bear with us with any teething problems that are inevitable in introducing a new system.

Now to the five papers which form the content of this volume. Several of our papers focus on the customer, though using different approaches in different contexts and settings, with issues relating to country of origin (COO) represented more than once. In our first paper, Evanschitzky et al. report that marketing researchers have found consistent support for the existence of domestic-country bias in consumer product preferences. Their study extends the work of Balabanis and Diamantopoulos (2004) and shows that consumer preference rankings can be explained by a combination of demographic variables and COO effects.

Our second paper by Ruvio et al. concentrates on developing and validating cross-culturally a short-form, consumers' need for uniqueness (CNFU) scale. The paper uses survey data from Israel, Slovenia, and the Palestinian Authority and a combination of statistical techniques, such as EFA, CFA, and SEM, finding support for the cross-cultural reliability and validity of this new, short-form CNFU scale. Both research and practitioner implications of this development are discussed.

Chattalas et al. advance a conceptual framework in which the impact of national stereotype dimensions on COO effects is explicitly modeled and decomposed, proposing that the perceived warmth and perceived competence dimensions of national stereotypes underlie COO effects. This is an original conceptualization offering testable research propositions regarding the relationship between national stereotype contents and COO-based consumer evaluations of products.

Our fourth paper by Ahmed and D'Astous again considers the COO effect and aims at an in-depth examination of COO perceptions of consumers in a multinational setting – three samples of consumers in Canada, Morocco, and Taiwan. It shows how explanatory factors like demographics, familiarity with a country's products, purchase behaviour, and psychological variables jointly work to explain consumers' COO perceptions.

In our final paper, Martinez et al. turn their attention to brand extension strategies, proposing and testing a model that shows how extending a brand affects the overall brand image. They analyse the relationships between the relevant variables in brand extension strategies in the UK and Spain to determine if the brand extension strategies have the same effect on brand image. Results show that the brand extension strategy dilutes the brand image in both markets, with the UK and Spanish consumers responding similarly to brand extensions.

We hope you agree that this mix of conceptual and empirical papers offers a range of unique insights into the field of international marketing, and that you will enjoy reading them.

Top ten reviewers 2005-2007

Finally, you will find a list of the ten reviewers to whom we wish to pay particular tribute for their outstanding support to us and contribution to the work of IMR over the past three years, 2005-2007 inclusive:

• Dr Marylyn Carrigan, University of Birmingham, UK
• Professor Paul Chao, Eastern Michigan University, USA
• Professor Costas Katsikeas, University of Leeds, UK
• Professor Leonidas Leonidou, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
• Professor Nicolas Papadopoulos, Carleton University, Canada
• Dr Nitish Singh, California State University – Chico, USA
• Professor K. Sivakumar, Lehigh University, USA
• Professor Chris Styles, University of Sydney, Australia
• Professor Isabelle T.D. Szmigin, University of Birmingham, UK
• Dr Marios Theodosiou, University of Cyprus, Cyprus

Singling out a small number from the many who have reviewed for us was no mean task, and we should like to take this opportunity to extend our thanks to all the members of the EAB, the review panel and to those who have reviewed for us as and when we have asked them, for their continued, valuable assistance in this regard. The journal would be unable to function without you all. We plan to repeat this exercise in the future.

Jeryl Whitelock

Reference

Balabanis, G. and Diamantopoulos, A. (2004), “Domestic country bias, country-of-origin effects, and consumer ethnocentrism: a multidimensional unfolding approach”, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Vol. 32 No. 1, pp. 80-95.