Jan-Benedict Steenkamp

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | UNC · Kenan-Flagler Marketing

We are honored that our paper “How perceived brand globalness creates brand value” (Steenkamp et al. 2003) has been selected for inclusion in this book. In this commentary, we will first provide a brief history of the genesis of this paper. Next, we will introduce some model extensions that have been made. Finally, we will identify several areas fo...

In today’s multinational marketplace, it is increasingly important to understand why some consumers prefer global brands to local brands. We delineate three pathways through which perceived brand globalness (PBG) influences the likelihood of brand purchase. Using consumer data from the U.S.A. and Korea, we find that PBG is positively related to bot...

The gold standard for modeling multiple indicator measurement data is confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), which has many statistical advantages over traditional exploratory factor analysis (EFA). In most CFA applications, items are assumed to be pure indicators of the construct they intend to measure. However, despite our best efforts, this is ofte...

We examine why some brands are able to ride the wave of macroeconomic expansions, while other brands are better able to successfully weather contractions. Using a utility-based framework, we develop hypotheses how the impact of these shocks on brand equity is moderated by six strategic brand factors—price positioning, advertising spending, product...

New product activity is critical for sustained success of consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands. However, the impact of new SKUs on the perceived quality, quality uncertainty and subsequent choice of the brand as a whole is, as of yet, not well understood. The authors study how new additions to the brand line shape consumers’ quality perceptions, an...

The field's knowledge of marketing-mix elasticities is largely restricted to developed countries in the North-Atlantic region, even though other parts of the world-especially the Indo-Pacific Rim region-have become economic powerhouses. To better allocate marketing budgets, firms need to have information about marketing-mix elasticities for countri...

Identifying which animal best represents your leadership style offers lessons from some of history’s greats and helps you evolve.

Our field’s knowledge of marketing-mix elasticities is largely restricted to developed countries in the North-Atlantic region, even though other parts of the world—especially the Indo-Pacific Rim region—have become economic powerhouses. To better allocate marketing budgets, firms need to have information about marketing-mix elasticities for countri...

As competition among CPG brands intensifies in both emerging and developed markets, brand managers increasingly focus on price as the weapon-of-choice. This calls for an assessment of not only their own price response, but also of their competitive pricing power, and its antecedents. The authors propose a set of universally applicable (“etic”) and...

Firms around the world strive for disruptive leadership. Through a case study of Admiral Jacky Fisher, who completely disrupted the immensely powerful British Royal Navy at the beginning of the 20th century, preparing it for the onset, just four years later, of World War I, Jan-Benedict Steenkamp identifies six key characteristics of disruptive lea...

Research on metrics is consistently designated a priority by academics and practitioners. However, less is known about how culture and cross-national differences can potentially impact metric use, which is theoretically and managerially limiting. This work develops a model that examines national and organizational cultural antecedents while control...

Measurement invariance is necessary before any substantive cross-national comparisons can be made. The statistical workhorse for conducting measurement invariance analyses is the multigroup confirmatory factor analysis model. This model works well if a few items exhibit clearly differential item functioning, but it is not able to capture, model, an...

Online grocery in China is on the rise. With large differences in brands’ abilities to secure a portion of China’s online pie, a key question is what drives these differences. The authors derive how a brand’s total sales change as the online grocery share goes up, and they show that it depends on two indices: (1) the brand’s online index (brand’s o...

Technological advances have resulted in a hyperconnected world, requiring a reassessment of branding research from the perspectives of firms, consumers, and society. Brands are shifting away from single ownership to shared ownership, as heightened access to information and people is allowing more stakeholders to cocreate brand meanings and experien...

The rapid spread of the internet and internet-based technologies is reshaping how companies build and manage global brands. While specific platforms and technologies change rapidly, what does not change quickly are the underlying trends. This article identifies the implications of five core underlying digital trends for global brand building and ma...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to offer a new conceptual model for nation branding, rooted in the marketing literature, with associated tasks for the nation brand marketer. Design/methodology/approach The paper draws on the extant literatures on brand identity systems, cultural branding and brand equity to develop a conceptual model for nati...

The essence of a brand is that it delivers on its promises. However, consumers’ trust in brands (CTB) has declined around the world in recent decades. As a result, CTB has become a major concern for managers. The authors examine whether CTB is influenced by marketing-mix activities (i.e., advertising, new product introduction, distribution, price,...

Research on metrics is consistently designated a priority by academics and practitioners. However, less is known about how culture and cross-national differences can potentially impact metric use, which is theoretically and managerially limiting. This work develops a model that examines national and organizational cultural antecedents while control...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to offer a different perspective on the global consumer culture (GCC) phenomenon and identify new avenues for future research. Design/methodology/approach The paper is a thought piece. Findings The unprecedented globalization of the marketplace in the last 50 years has given rise to the emergence of GCC, an...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a response to papers written by Professors Samiee, Belk and Özsomer as commentary pieces on my original paper, “The uncertain future of globalization: implications for global consumer culture and global brands.” Design/methodology/approach The paper is in the form of an essay. Findings The commentar...

Marketing academics are keenly aware of the seismic shifts in today's marketing environment caused by digital (dis)intermediation. In this article, we discuss four types of digital (dis)intermediation, and how they affect branding activities of incumbents and new firms. First, we discuss digital transaction intermediation, a development that is clo...

The last few decades have seen the emergence of global consumer culture (GCC) as an important force in the marketplace. Yet, in recent years, powerful political and economic forces suggest that globalization might be stalling, leading to renewed interest in local consumer culture (LCC). This article provides an overview of where the field of intern...

When multinational corporations face foreign marketing crises, the psychic distance between the home and host country represents a distinct challenge. This paper examines the curvilinear relationship between psychic distance and firm performance during marketing crises, and the moderating role of marketing capabilities. We test our hypotheses using...

While previous research has investigated various drivers of electronic word of mouth (eWOM), the firm's offline competitive environment has not been considered. The authors explore this new horizon and examine the different effects of firms' geographic concentration, or agglomeration, on the volume of eWOM received. They distinguish three types of...

Marketing activities that influence shoppers along the various stages of their path-to-purchase are gaining attention from both manufacturers and retailers. Using a dataset with detailed information on 105 new products (NPs) launched in the U.K. by 44 leading brands and sold across 13 major retail banners, we provide strong support for the prominen...

Steenkamp introduces the global brand value chain and explains how brand equity factors into shareholder value. The book equips executives with techniques for developing strategy, organizing execution, and measuring results so that your brand will prosper globally. What sets strong global brands apart? First, they generate more than half their reve...

Public opinion of the roles of companies in society has shifted dramatically in recent decades. Producing high-quality goods and services is no longer enough. Constituents expect corporations to address environmental and social problems linked to whatever they sell and however they conduct business. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) refers to v...

With the advent of mass media in the 1960s, immortalized in the TV series Mad Men, the pace of brand introduction, sophistication, and importance accelerated dramatically. The world has witnessed a “Cambrian explosion” of brands. The digital revolution of the twenty-first century with cheap mobiles, big data, social media, and global connectivity h...

In the daily grind of global brand management, many marketing executives get hung up on customer preference for global over local brands. Yet customers may not even know or may not care that a brand is globally available. And many global brands, such as Aldi, Pampers, Gillette, Dove, and Heinz do not tout their globalness, perhaps because some cust...

What is the payoff of successful global brand building and management activities? Higher brand equity. In accounting terms, brand equity is the goodwill adhering to the brand—the positive (or negative!) outcomes that a company realizes from a product with its name on it. Say you wanted to offer a new brown, carbonated soft drink, “You Cola.” Custom...

In my research and analysis of diverse global brands, I have observed a surprisingly simple handful of customer propositions. In general, the most successful fall into one of five categories, which I refer to as value, mass, premium, prestige, and fun brands. Each of these targets a different global segment defined by the segment’s universal needs,...

Abandon the idea that global marketing means standardization. You should focus on global integration—that is, on the degree of coordination of marketing mix activities across countries. This requires a mindset that is oriented toward looking for cross-national similarities, not differences. Cross-national differences in behavior may disguise potent...

The value of the 100 most valuable global brands has grown on average by 8.8 % per year since 2005, to a staggering $3.4 trillion in 2016. While I am optimistic about the global potential of brands from all corners of the earth, I am not oblivious to the threats that global corporations face. I see as the main threats that globalization might stall...

With the explosion of Internet users, growing from 360 million (5.9 % of the world’s population) in 2000 to 3.4 billion (46.4 %) in 2016, the digital space is reshaping how organizations go global with their brands. Any chapter written about digital branding strategies runs the risk of obsolescence before it hits the printer. Specific digital platf...

A strong brand can tumble not because its customer proposition and marketing program are weak but because the organization fails to implement the strategy. While global brands benefit the multinational corporation, their complexity increases costs. That’s the global brand paradox. Multinational corporations (MNCs) have to achieve four goals: mainta...

Accountability is a watchword in today’s corporations. Senior marketing executives must be able to show how their investments in building strong global brands create shareholder value rather than waste profits. The ability to justify marketing expenditures in terms of shareholder value and to present evidence of results gives senior marketing execu...

If the organizational structure is the anatomy of the firm, the management processes are its physiology. Thus, effective global brand management is as integral to a multinational’s success as its short term capital management and long-term investment plan. Failure to do so inevitably leads to clotting, weakening, and mediocrity. Yet only 10 % of co...

In recent years, marketing researchers have become increasingly interested in under- and overreporting. However, there are few suitable approaches to operationalize deviations from the truth, particularly in behavioral domains in which self-reports are usually the only viable method of choice to measure behavior or attitudes. An especially difficul...

Research summary: We examine the interplay of behavioral and environmental uncertainty in shaping the effectiveness of two key governance mechanisms used by strategic alliances: contractual and trust-based governance. We develop and test hypotheses, using a meta-analytic dataset encompassing over 15,000 strategic alliances across 82 independent sam...

One of the initiatives at Customer Needs and Solutions (CNS) is to encourage the development of top marketing scholarship in emerging markets, especially in China and India. This will not only help develop the scholars there but also help highlight critical marketing problems unique to these markets and encourage research on understudied segments (...

This article examines the temporal dynamics in 11 consumer traits in a broad sample of 1,411 Dutch consumers followed for 12 years. The traits encompass consumer-specific expressions of all Big Five personality dimensions and map responses to the 4 Ps. The authors examine measurement stability and individual and population trajectories over time, a...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework – the 4V model – for better understanding how global brands create firm value. Organized around the global brand value chain, the 4V model includes four sets of value-creating activities: first, valued brands; second, value sources; third, value delivery; and fourth, valued ou...

A lthough store brands (SBs) are becoming increasingly important across the world, their success varies dramatically across consumer packaged goods categories and countries. The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into how such differences in SB success originate. Using a unique data set that combines scanner data for a three-to five-year p...

From China Mobile to Coal India, state‐supported firms are on the march. Nirmalya Kumar and Jan‐Benedict EM Steenkamp map out the route from being a national champion to becoming a global brand.

Firms are under increasing pressure to justify their marketing expenditures. This evolution towards greater accountability is reinforced in harsh economic times when marketing budgets are among the first to be reconsidered. Such decisions require information whether, and to what extent, marketing’s effectiveness varies with the economic tide. Howev...

It is fitting that the 30th volume of the International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM) opens with a special issue on marketing in emerging markets. IJRM was founded with the goal of integrating findings from marketing research in all countries (Wierenga, 1984), featuring research on marketing in emerging markets from the first issue (Sente...

What do Airbus, Michelin, Hyundai, NEC, Samsung, Singapore Airlines, Volkswagen, and LG have in common? They all started as national champions, companies supported by their governments at a time when their countries were emerging or recovering from the ravages of war. Their achievements in the global marketplace have inspired emerging countries to...

The word diaspora comes from Greek διασπoρά, meaning “scattering, dispersion.” It is “the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral homeland.”1 As professors based in London and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, we belong to the Indian and the Dutch diasporas, respectively. We are among 215 million first-generati...

Some time ago, we held a seminar at a large emerging market car manufacturer. We began by displaying pictures of identical Volkswagen cars captioned as “made in Germany” and “made in Mexico.” When we asked executives which of the two cars they preferred, the room filled with laughter. The German one, of course! Their own reaction summarized 10 slid...

Global firms from emerging markets tend to compete in business markets, that is, they sell their output to overseas companies (B2B) or governments (B2G) rather than to households (B2C) in foreign countries. In business markets, a firm typically targets a limited set of organizational customers, who buy in bulk based on rational price and quality, n...

In Chapter 5, we looked at how emerging market brands generally suffer from the negative image of their country of origin. That is, a brand’s roots in an emerging market reduce its appeal on such dimensions as quality, innovativeness, aesthetics, price/ value, social responsibility, and prestige. There are, however, exceptions. In certain product c...

Perceptions, even of astute observers, are driven by what currently exists and straight-line projections of this. This is often sold by the business consulting industry as best practice. It is much harder to see turning points, especially those that differ radically from the trajectory in place. While China has been manufacturing for the world over...

Who has not heard of the bubbly beverage champagne? Why does champagne command higher prices and higher brand equity than other sparkling wines? Because France has branded this natural resource. Winemakers produce champagne from grapes grown in the Champagne region in the north-east of France; the process requires secondary fermentation of the wine...

What do Toyota and Samsung have in common? They are the only two Asian companies that appear on both the Interbrand list and the Millward Brown list of the most valuable global brands (Table 1.1). To rank on the Interbrand 100, a brand must have a global sales footprint. Toyota and Samsung do, along with eight other Asian brands from the automotive...

Jaguars are the largest of the South American cats. In native language, jaguar means “he who kills with one leap,”1 a description that fits such characters as James Bond and the winners of Le Mans, the world’s oldest sports car race of endurance and efficiency. The jaguar figure fixed on the hoods of automobiles has become iconic and, for a time, w...

One central business activity that companies increasingly outsource is the information systems (IS) function. Previous research has shown that outsourcing of back-office IS generally has a positive effect on shareholder value of the outsourcing firm. Much less is known about the performance implications of outsourcing of another important IS functi...

The authors investigate whether, and to what extent, marketing conduct varies over the business cycle and how this contributes to the growing popularity of private labels. To address this issue, they examine a unique data set that combines a broad set of seven marketing-mix instruments with private-label share, using two decades' worth of data for...

The authors investigate whether, and to what extent, marketing conduct varies over the business cycle, and how this contributes to the growing popularity of private labels. To address this, a unique dataset is examined that combines a broad set of seven marketing-mix instruments with private-label share, using data covering two decades for 106 cons...

The critical role of research and development (R&D) and advertising in the marketing strategy of the firm is well established. This paper conceptually and empirically examines why and how much the effectiveness of these two marketing instruments differs between times of economic expansions versus periods of economic contractions-and whether these r...

Transaction cost economics (TCE) is probably the most widely accepted theory on how firms can gain competitive advantage through efficient organization of their economic transactions. However, by focusing on the competitive environment in which companies operate, it abstracts from the cultural context in which governance decisions are made. We stud...

T he critical role of research and development (R&D) and advertising in the marketing strategy of the firm is well established. This paper conceptually and empirically examines why and how much the effectiveness of these two marketing instruments differs between times of economic expansions versus periods of economic contractions—and whether these...

The growing sales of private labels (PLs) pose significant challenges for national brands (NBs) around the world. A major question is whether consumers continue to be willing to pay a price premium for NBs over PLs. Using consumer survey data from 22,623 respondents from 23 countries in Asia, Europe, and the Americas across, on average, 63 consumer...

The notion that human behavior is sometimes instigated by the mere desire to attain a satisfactory level of stimulation has figured prominently among psychological theories investigating motivational tendencies as causes of people's actions. People tend to prefer intermediate levels of stimulation, referred to as the optimal stimulation level (OSL)...

The growing sales of private labels (PLs) pose significant challenges for national brands (NBs) around the world. A major question is whether consumers continue to be willing to pay a price premium for NBs over PLs. Using consumer survey data from 22,623 respondents from 23 countries in Asia, Europe, and the Americas across, on average, 63 consumer...

Socially desirable responding (SDR) has been of long-standing interest to the field of marketing. Unfortunately, the construct has not always been well understood by marketing researchers. The authors provide a review of the SDR literature organized around three key issues— the conceptualization and measurement of SDR; the nomological constellation...

In this article, the authors introduce attitude toward global products (AGP) and attitude toward local products (ALP) as generalized attitudinal constructs and address the four issues these constructs raise: (1) How are AGP and ALP related to each other? (2) What is the motivational structure underlying AGP and ALP? (3) Is the proposed theory cultu...

Socially desirable responding (SDR) has been of long-standing interest to the field of marketing. Unfortunately, the construct has not always been well understood by marketing researchers. The authors provide a review of the SDR literature organized around three key issues the conceptualization and measurement of SDR; the nomological constellation...

This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...

In the last few decades, the measurement of marketing constructs has improved tremendously. Our discipline has also started to systematically catalogue our measurement knowledge in influential handbooks of marketing scales. However, at least two important issues remain. First, existing scales are often too long for administration in nonstudent samp...

Meta-analysis has become increasingly popular in management research to quantitatively integrate research findings across a large number of studies. In an effort to help shape future applications of meta-analysis in management, this study chronicles and evaluates the decisions that management researchers made in 69 meta-analytic studies published b...

The current recession is the most brutal economic downturn in a lifetime. One industry where the consequences of the recession are felt particularly hard is the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry. In the past, this industry was dominated by such well-known manufacturer brands as Ariel detergent, Nescafé coffee, Philadelphia cream cheese, Fl...

The authors develop an econometric model of the relationship between a household's private-label (PL) share and its behavioral store loyalty. The model includes major drivers of these two behaviors and controls for simultaneity and nonlinearity in the relationship between them. The model is estimated with a unique data set that combines complete pu...

The authors examine the value-destroying and value-enhancing effects of a giant player's foreign entry on incumbents operating in that region. They use Wal-Mart's entry into the United Kingdom, through its acquisition of Asda, as the empirical context. Drawing on the marketing, strategy, and finance literature streams, the authors develop hypothese...

The authors develop an econometric model of the relationship between a household's private-label (PL) share and its behavioral store loyalty. The model includes major drivers of these two behaviors and controls for simultaneity and nonlinearity in the relationship between them. The model is estimated with a unique data set that combines complete pu...

The authors examine the value-destroying and value-enhancing effects of a giant player's foreign entry on incumbents operating in that region. They use Wal-Mart's entry into the United Kingdom, through its acquisition of Asda, as the empirical context. Drawing on the marketing, strategy, and finance literature streams, the authors develop hypothese...

The authors investigate the effectiveness of service transition strategies for generating shareholder value by evaluating secondary data pertaining to 477 publicly traded manufacturing firms during 1990-2005. The impact of a firm's transition to services on firm value (as measured by Tobin's q) remains relatively flat or slightly negative until the...

The authors investigate the effectiveness of service transition strategies for generating shareholder value by evaluating secondary data pertaining to 477 publicly traded manufacturing firms during 1990–2005. The impact of a firm's transition to services on firm value (as measured by Tobin's q) remains relatively flat or slightly negative until the...

Extreme response style (ERS) is an important threat to the validity of survey-based marketing research. In this article, the authors present a new item response theory–based model for measuring ERS. This model contributes to the ERS literature in two ways. First, the method improves on existing procedures by allowing different items to be different...