Reflections on Czinkota and Ronkainen's International Marketing Manifesto: A Perspective from Asia

Abstract

In their stimulating review of the current state of international marketing (IM), Czinkota and Ronkainen (2003) highlight important issues regarding current IM scholarship from both an academic and a practitioner perspective. In particular, they pose questions regarding the significance of research in IM in adding to the understanding, in terms of both theory and practice, of what is really happening in international markets. They also note that businesspeople and policymakers appear to pay little attention to IM scholars. As a result, these scholars’ voices are largely ignored in the public debate on critical issues such as globalization. The issue of the contribution of IM scholarship to understanding the real world of IM through appropriate theoretical and applied research is critical. If scholars in the field are not making significant contributions in furthering theory and practice, there is no great loss if the research being undertaken and the perspectives of IM scholars are largely ignored. Therefore, the starting point for my comments is to consider the significance of current IM scholarship. Judging the relevance and quality of scholarly work is difficult. Unheralded contributions may have major long-term significance, whereas current work generally deemed to be “hot” may be of ephemeral interest. People in the field may also be too close to the work being conducted and thus lack the perspective needed for a clinical and objective diagnosis. Despite these perils, some comments are in order, and these are informed by the views of colleagues who have examined the current corpus of scholarship in IM in the recent past. An assessment of the development of research in IM, undertaken a decade ago, concluded that “significant progress has been achieved in the 1980s, and the field of IM is on its way to becoming a more integrated and systematic field of study” (Cavusgil and Li 1991, p. 601). A recent review of research trends in IM during the 1990s is more cautious in tone and raises concerns that robust theoretical frameworks in IM are underdeveloped; that important topics, such as marketing strategy and segmentation, are underexplored; and that too much work is exploratory in nature (Kotabe 2001). Many of these concerns have been echoed in other reviews of the IM