Conjoining International Marketing and Relationship Marketing: Exploring Consumers’ Cross-Border Service Relationships
Published 3/1/2009
Author: Edwin J. Nijssen and Hester van Herk
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Executive Summary
Research on international marketing constructs, such as consumer ethnocentrism and country-of-origin effects, typically focuses on consumers’ initial evaluations of foreign products but ignores consumers’ emerging cross-border exchange relationships with foreign service providers. This seems to be at odds with the observation that cross-border shopping has evolved into a significant and worldwide phenomenon. With the world changing and cross-border shopping increasingly becoming a structural phenomenon, research attention should shift toward studying the influence of international marketing constructs on the development of these new exchange relationships and their dynamics.
Nijssen and Van Herk address this issue and call for new research that conjoins the international and relationship marketing literature streams. They provide an illustrative example using survey data and develop a research agenda that identifies several avenues for further research. The empirical test involves a study of German consumers who regularly cross the German–Dutch border to attend to their bank accounts with a foreign (i.e., Dutch) bank. It shows that loyalty to the foreign financial service provider may be explained using substantive relational antecedents but that international marketing antecedents complement the picture. In particular, positive beliefs about the foreign industry and negative feelings of consumer ethnocentrism influence the value and loyalty constructs. This finding confirms that international context matters for the evolution of the relationship, and it illustrates the ambivalent feelings consumers experience in the exchange process.
Nijssen and Van Herk suggest five avenues for further research. First, researchers should try to better understand the dynamics of cross-border exchange relationships. They should try to model positive and negative emotions simultaneously to discern how consumers’ emotions evolve and adjust marketing efforts accordingly. Second, new constructs should be developed to capture more effectively the positive attitudes that consumers may develop over time and that may affect the cross-border exchange relationship. Third, researchers should extend their work by modeling contextual effects. In addition to drawing on country-of-origin theory, researchers could adapt institutional theory to increase understanding of why consumers prefer transactional rather than relational exchanges in certain cross-border situations. Fourth, researchers could explore differences in the dynamics of the exchange relationship of people with both low and high levels of ethnocentrism. These groups may have different motivations for engaging with a foreign provider and may travel different trajectories. Fifth, research could focus on the extent to which a less or more positive product–country image in the service industry contributes to the development of ongoing relationships with foreign providers.
Biography
Ed Nijssen holds a PhD from Tilburg University and is Professor of Marketing at the Department of Technology Management of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. His interests focus on new product development, relationship marketing, and international marketing issues. He has published articles in journals, such as Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Industrial Marketing Management, R&D Management, and Long Range Planning.
Hester van Herk holds a PhD from Tilburg University and is Associate Professor of Marketing and Marketing Research in the Department of Marketing at VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her research interests are in cross-cultural marketing and research methodology. She has published on these issues in various journals, such as Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, European Journal of Marketing, Food Quality and Preference, and Multivariate Behavioral Research.
J International Marketing, Volume 17, Number 1, March 2009
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