Gary Gregory, Munib Karavdic, and Shaoming Zou
Executive Summary
The emergence of e-commerce technology has had a significant effect on firm’s international marketing, creating opportunities for exporters to improve international operations and enhance export effectiveness. The diffusion of e-commerce based technologies requires firms to employ technologies to develop low-cost customer-prospecting methods, efficient international trading processes, and close relationships with customers and partners around the world. However, due to the lack of integration of e-commerce studies with export marketing strategy theory, little is known as to how e-commerce influences a firm’s export market strategy and export performance. Gregory, Karavdic and Zou’s study addresses this gap in the literature by examining how e-commerce drivers affect a firm’s export marketing strategy in an export venture market.
The study identifies the underlying dimensions of e-commerce and extends existing export marketing theories by integrating e-commerce drivers into the environment-strategy relationship. Internal and external e-commerce drivers are conceptualized and theorized both as antecedents of export marketing strategy and as moderators of the relationship between environmental factors and export marketing strategy. The empirical results of the study offer support for this extended theory of export marketing strategy and demonstrate that by focusing on the effects of e-commerce drivers on export marketing strategy, exporters can gain a better understanding of how e-commerce can be used to enhance a firm’s export performance.
The main managerial utility of Gregory, Karavdic and Zou’s study is that e-commerce is a business imperative that applies to export operations of firms. Export managers need to secure senior management’s commitment and initiatives to devote necessary resources, in terms of both technology (e.g. firm’s e-commerce infrastructure) and necessary technology management skills (e.g. human resources) for effectively utilizing e-commerce for internal and external marketing activities and processes relevant to the firm’s export market. When formulating export marketing strategy, managers should carefully examine their firms’ e-commerce assets and product transferability, as well as customers’ demand for e-commerce and export markets’ e-commerce infrastructure, to make sure that their strategy addresses these important e-commerce drivers. In addition, export managers need to recognize that e-commerce drivers can affect how they respond to environmental factors. Proper investment in e-commerce assets and in making products/services more “digitizable” facilitate the co-alignment of export marketing strategy to environmental drivers in the implementation stage. Meeting client demand for e-commerce also serves as an important motivator for firms to fulfill their obligations in Internet-based marketing, forcing firms to become more price-competitive. Furthermore, as export market e-commerce infrastructure becomes more developed, exporters need to make better use e-commerce technologies to improve distribution efficiency, reduce distribution costs, simplify transactions and increase scale economies.
Biography
Gary Gregory is Senior Lecturer of Marketing and Director of the Centre for Applied Marketing at the University of New South Wales. He received his PhD from the University of Texas at Arlington, his MBA from Central Michigan University, and his BS in Business from Central Michigan University. His areas of marketing expertise and interest include e-commerce, exporting, consumer behavior, and cross-cultural marketing. His has worked in the computer technology industry and in and education. In addition to Journal of International Marketing, he has recently published in International Marketing Review, Marketing Theory, Journal of Consumer Marketing, and Journal of Business Research. Gregory is currently exploring the role of capabilities and resources (e.g., e-commerce) in developing competitive advantage, the use of humor in cross-cultural advertising, and the role of national identity and ethnocentrism in brand evaluation.
Munib Karavdic received his BBus and MCom from the University of Sarajevo, Bosnia, and Herzegovina and his PhD from the University of New South Wales. His areas of marketing expertise and interest include international marketing strategies and e-commerce, corporate strategies and strategic planning, and marketing strategies and customer relationship management. Karavdic has been working in various marketing consulting and management roles for more than 15 years. Currently, he is a head of retail strategy development at St. George Bank, which is the fifth largest bank in Australia and an industry leader in customer satisfaction. In parallel with full-time engagement in corporate world, Karavdic has been involved in teaching as a visiting fellow at University of New South Wales since 2004. Before this, he held visiting academic posts at Macquarie Graduate School of Management and Wollongong University. In addition to Journal of International Marketing, he has recently published in Marketing Theory. He has written the book E-Commerce and Export Performance (Cambria Press) and has contributed a book chapter (along with coauthor Gary Gregory) in Internet Commerce and Software Agents (Idea Group Publishing).
Shaoming Zou (PhD and MBA, Michigan State University) is Associate Professor of Marketing and International Business at the University of Missouri–Columbia. His areas of expertise are in marketing strategy, the determinants of export performance, and global marketing strategy. He has published in major marketing and international business journals, such as Journal of International Marketing, Journal of Marketing, Decision Sciences, International Business Review, and Journal of Advertising. His work is among the most cited in international marketing and has won several research awards.
Journal of International Marketing, Vol. 15, No. 2, June 2007
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