Editorial

Citation

Crosier, K. (2007), "Editorial", Marketing Intelligence & Planning, Vol. 25 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/mip.2007.02025daa.001

Editorial

Now this is what I like to see: a thought-provoking Right-to-Reply from an éminence grise in marketing education in the UK, plus six peer-reviewed articles by authors of six nationalities working in eight countries. There is a definite flavour of the “Second World” so neglected by us First, Worlders in our current obsession with those massive economies emerging from the Third World. I offer you Turkey (twice), The Lebanon, Israel and Chile, not to mention the PRC and Vietnam. Oh yes, and the UK and Australia. No Americans this time. What's more, this kind of pattern is very likely to be repeated in issue number five. Hallelujah! The principles and practice of Marketing Intelligence & Planning are escaping from the Anglo-Saxon stranglehold.

The Viewpoint for this issue is actually a Right-to-Reply, exercised by an Emeritus Professor of Marketing of my own university. Loyal readers of these Editorials will know that we are proud live by the edict of the eighteenth-century professor of Natural Philosophy who founded us: to be a “place of useful learning”. Michael J. Thomas responds to one of the six viewpoints in issue number three of this volume, by an Anglo-Australian adjunct academic on the “cult of the PhD” (Boddy, 2007). He wishes to add emphasis to the passing mention there of the DBA – Doctor of Business Administration – as a valuable alternative. By its requirement that the thesis must have as much connection with and relevance to the real-world practice of business administration as the syllabus of the MBA does (or should), it offers hope of a solution to the increasingly scholarly rarification of doctorates in marketing, as noted by Boddy and many others. He proposes two further steps forward: that candidates should be supervised in parallel by an academic and a practitioner, and must publish work-in-progress in journals “actually read by practitioners”. The Harvard Business School has faith in the DBA, he points out, and practitioners read the Harvard Business Review. Every business school worth its salt should sit up and take note, now.

From the Department of Business at ÜludagÆ University in Turkey, professors Murat Hakan Altintas¸ and Tuncer Tokol report their own study of consumer ethnocentrism in Turkey, and the implications for international marketers targeting this large, modernising economy. A certain piquancy is added for European readers by the reverberations of the European Union's decision to grant “candidate country” status to one that is physically located in Asia Minor (the vast majority of it at least) and culturally Islamic. The paper includes a useful preamble on the relationship between Turkey and its European neighbours.

If you are tempted to dismiss the authors' research as parochial or second-world, and you live in a society where models of consumption behaviour are simpler, persevere. In particular, note the interesting distinction made ethnocentrism and xenophobia, and the relationship of both to nationalism. Brought up as a good European, and having done a good part of my growing up in New York City, I instinctively think of ethnocentric behaviour as questionably motivated, at best, and have an innate suspicion of nationalism. This is also how it is treated by the authors of a paper in issue number three of this volume (Svensson and Wood, 2007). But Altintas¸ and Tokol paint a picture of something much softer and potentially more positive. They also point out that it can include the internalisation of another culture, rather than one's own, placing that one at the centre of one's “ethnic” behaviour. This perhaps explains why, while political leaders in Scotland emphasise Scottishness first, Britishness second and Europeanness a distant third, significant numbers of young consumers are slavish followers of American popular culture, and dress from head to toe in “world” brands. There is much food for though here, for planners and strategists, and useful links to be made to the literature of branding and country-of-origin effects in emerging markets: see, for example, the articles in last year's volume by Xie and Boggs (2006) and Kinra (2006).

Next, a research study conducted in Turkey and written up by two Turkish academics, one of whom plies his trade in The Lebanon. Mehmet Haluk Köksal is Assistant Professor in the S. Olayan School of Business at American University of Beirut; his co-author Engin Özgül holds the same post in the School of Economics and Business Administration of Dokuz Eylül University, in IÇzmir. Interestingly, in the context of the previous paper, that city might be better know as Smyrna by many readers, a legacy of its years as part of Greater Greece. It is the birthplace of Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping tycoon who married President J. F. Kennedy's widow, of Sir Alec Issigonis, the Automotive Engineer who designed of the legendary Mini, and of the former Prime Minister of France, Édouard Balladur. It is said that Homer lived there. Naturally, it is also the home of many famous Turks, past and present.

Köksal and Özgül are concerned with how firms operating in conditions of economic crisis – specifically the two episodes that swiftly followed one another in Turkey in 2000 and 2001 – modify their deployment of the element of the marketing mix in response to the challenges they face. This recalls the “turbulence” of slightly different but no less challenging kind in South Africa that was the subject of a paper in issue number two of this volume (Pitt et al., 2007). Following and exceptionally lucid literature review, they report a study of firms in Turkey during that period and immediately afterwards, which found that appropriate changes in marketing-mix strategy could indeed offer protection against the worst effects of the general recession, and would often confer comparative advantage over the competition in terms of sales, market share and profitability.

We now move considerably further east, to a city of nine million people in the centre of the People's Republic of China. At the time of writing, You-Ping Yu was a doctoral candidate in the School of Management at the Huazhong University of Science & Technology, in Wuhan, where Shu-Qin Cai is the Director of the Institute of Enterprise Intelligence. Their article opens with a discussion of customer relationship management, which might strike a Western reader as pretty old hat. But the point is, of course, that it reflects the current state of marketing thought among our counterparts in China, and that is something we need to know about if we want productive international dialogue within our discipline. Like Köksal and Özgül, Yu and Cai focus on how firms deal with problematical characteristics of the operating environment. Specifically, Yu describes a mathematical model he has developed, for identifying the “best” customers with whom to initiate a lasting relationship, and sets out to show how it worked for one large manufacturing firm faced with a scarcity of the kind of market intelligence that we would take for granted. Sensibly, he consigns the details of the computations to appendices. That constraint on accurate targeting will be equally challenging, of course, for international marketers planning their firms' entry to the Chinese market.

We do not deny non-native speakers of English access to our readership just because their usage is unorthodox, as long as they have something interesting to convey. Furthermore, we definitely do encourage young researchers to pass on applicable insights to you. That said, you may think that the use of “promotional initiatives” in this paper implies something rather more than deployment of the fourth P of the marketing mix, as it did in the previous one, and not be sure exactly what else. You may also miss the exact intended meaning of such a phrase as “certain incomplete customers”. The authors' use of certain versus uncertain to describe customers according to their “stay time” and complete versus incomplete to define the amount of available information that went into their classification, are completely logical and consistent, but they do result in a need for attentive reading and occasional decoding. Likewise, what the acronyms CTCE, CTDE and CTPE actually stand for does not make it immediately clear what these indices actually are. However, the important fact is that the reviewers thought it would be worth your while to read about this empirically well grounded “customer targeting funnel model”. With that encouragement, the lead author strove diligently – thrice – to increase the clarity of the explanation. We should all be willing to make the small interpretation effort that may sometimes be needed in any case like this, do not you agree?

Let us stay in the Far East. Tho D. Nguyen is a member of faculty at both the University of Economics in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. He reports a field study of the use of the internet by internationalising firms based in the Vietnamese capital, where that familiar technology is till a comparative novelty. Data collected by questionnaire were tested for fit with an existing model of the adoption of technological innovations, by structural equation modelling.

He found that two key variables in the Technology Acceptance Model were good predictors of uptake and use: usefulness and ease of use, as perceived by those would be using the internet. No surprise, but the proof is comforting. Market orientation was also a predictor; is not it of everything? So was a corporate learning orientation, exerting its influence by first building and reinforcing positive perceptions. Nguyen therefore proposes that all support packages provided by training agencies and the like to internationalising firms, in any country at a similarly early stage of internet adoption, should not only present all the right messages about how useful it is in business and how easy to master, but also foster a learning orientation in the client firms.

Moving onward and eastward around the globe to the Far West, we meet Christian Felzensztein, Assistant Professor of Marketing and International Business at the Universidad Austral de Chile, and Eli Gimmon, Visiting Professor there but also Lecturer in Entrepreneurship at the Tel-Hai Academic College in Israel. That institution, so far north in the country that he is practically a neighbour of Köksal in Beirut, dedicates itself not only to education but also to acting as an agent of social and economic development in the highly strategic Upper Galilee region of Israel.

This truly intercontinental duo report a research study conducted in two of the three nations that dominate the world salmon farming industry: Chile and Scotland. Norway, which is the third and most successful, was the subject of an equally intercontinental case study of its export marketing efforts in Taiwan, as an illustration of country-of-origin effect, in the first, issue of this volume (Bhaskaran and Sukumaran, 2007). Felzensztein and Gimmon's objective was to assess the effect that national and sub-national cultural characteristics have on the degree of cooperation among the firms in the industry, with their size as a contributory factor. In that respect, their study has a connection with Altintas¸ and Tokol's investigation of how acculturation affects import-export collaboration. It also recalls the notion of “co-opetition” among firms that one might at first,glance expect to be too busy competing with one another, as described in an article in Volume 22 (Zineldin, 2004).

Depth interviews were conducted in two regions of Chile and three in Scotland. Of the latter, one in particular, the Shetland Islands, is closer to Bergen than to Edinburgh and midway between Reykjavik and London. Unsurprisingly, it has a very distinctive sub-culture indeed. Felzensztein and Gimmon found that size did have some small effect on the level of inter-firm cooperation, but national culture very little. Where a the sub-national culture is strong, however, as in Shetland, the effect is to enhance collaboration. Given the importance of acquaculture to all three countries, these tentative findings must be of interest to strategists and public policy formers there. The big question is, of course, how transferable are they to other industries and within and among other nations, such as the 27 constituent countries of the European Union and their numerous sub-national cultures.

(These can be complex and delicate distinctions. The BBC, for example, has a remit to serve “the nations and regions of the UK” which include, while the concept of “France” includes territories and dependencies around the globe.)

Finally, home to the UK; to Scotland, in fact. From the Management School of the University of Edinburgh, Jake Ansell, Professor of Risk Management, Tina Harrison, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, and Tom Archibald, Reader in the School, show how lifestyle segmentation can be combined with “survival analysis” to assess the opportunity for cross-selling and up-selling in the insurance industry. The first of those two uses the unique ACORN geo-demographic profiling instrument, which allocates UK residents to lifestyle (which the authors also call “lifestage”) clusters on the basis of the seven-digit alphanumeric postcodes that contain an average of fifteen households each. The second, survival analysis, is a technique pioneered in biometrics: a “set of non-parametric, semi-parametric and parametric statistical techniques used to determine quantitatively the impact of a set of potentially influential variable on the elapsed time to the occurrence of an event”.

They note that firms in mature markets can experience the same problems as those in Yu and Cai's immature marketplace: customer churn, competition, time lag, repeat buying (or not) ... but not information shortage. The hoped-for solution is likewise to strengthen the relationship with their customers – in the case of the insurance business, not so much by cultivating it as a commercial cousin to friendship, but more by means of “golden handcuffs” fashioned by cross-selling other products in the portfolio or up-selling more profitable packages. The details my be different, and may furthermore vary within segments, but the strategies depend on many of the same things: good database information, for one. Here, again, we have a case example that marketing intelligence gatherers and marketing planners may find they can transfer to their own environments. If not quite that, then this article and the other in this issue can surely stimulate them to think laterally, and productively.

Three of the six research papers in this issue used structural equation modelling as the analytical method. I want to say something about that, but perhaps next time ...

Keith Crosier