Literature Map

The world has begun to fee smaller with the leaps created by technology in the transportation, financial flows and communication. Now it has become possible for the companies to develop business in any country of the world being facilitated by the advancement in the international trade. As per the reports of the World Trade Organization, between the year 1951 and 2010, the volume of international trade has enhanced up to 33 times. The brands which develop in a country is happily accepted in other countries. Taken for example, BMWs, Columbian Coffee, Louis Vuitton bags and other foreign product symbolize the standards and quality of the United States.

On the other hand, there are many American brand too which have equal foothold in the global markets such as the Warner Brother Motion Pictures. However, globalization has initiated challenges too fir the brands as it has initiated opportunities. Since the customers nowadays have so many options for a single product, the pressure on the brands has increased to maintain their attractiveness and innovativeness. Notably, the international marketing not only includes just the language, but it also consists of market saturation, culture and customer behaviors. The American and the European companies have converted their international marketing operations into a state more valuable than just exporting.

They have adapted their marketing strategies according to the demographics, consumer behaviors and the world markets. The consumer behavior and the demographics is brilliant followed by the Coca –Cola company. The company was well aware that in Latin America, the word ‘diet’ is negatively treated. Hence, the company changed the name of ‘diet coke’ and converted to ‘Coke Lite’. In a nutshell, the international marketing is nothing but the implementation of the marketing principles in various countries of the world. It is rather an extension of the local marketing strategy applied by the companies. It is a multinational process of distributing new ideas, services, goods and executing the conception in order to establish exchanges which meet the organizational and individual goals. This paper will be dedicated to the understanding of the concept of international marketing including the theories like brand awareness, brand equity, brand positioning and brand strategy.

A literature review map is helpful in presenting a graphical picture to visualize the relative relationships and connections between various theories and aspects. The mapping shows that the association between the various literatures can be helpful in identifying and demonstrating issues such as brand equity, brand awareness, brand positioning, strategy and the international marketing. The mapping helps make the connections based on the findings. Having analyzed a particular paper using the critical techniques, the mapping of the literature shows how it is in contrast with other already analyzed paper. In short, it is the identification of the key concept of the particular literature. There are various types of research methodologies in the field of academic research. The first research method used is of the stock return response model in order to investigate the development in the international market which comprises of the companies based on their quality measures accepted. The paper of Bartsch, Riefler and Diamantopoulos (2016) has resulted to be one of their significant equipment for the business managers since it was the first paper to investigate the optimistic relation between the quality standards of companies which is viewed by the customers and also the firms value evaluated by the price of the stock. The rest three of the approaches are the Fama French three –factor model especially in the article of Çifci et al. (2016). This model is also widely used for the purpose of studying the finance and marketing interfaces and the report has also picked two of the research papers that are the most connected with the brand awareness and the brand equity. Along with this, in the paper of Davvetas and Diamantopoulos (2016), another model has been used in order to understand the effects of brand equity on the stakeholders and the market. The value market model has been used by the other researchers evidently in the article of Godey et al. (2016). This research is one of the most focused papers on the market values of the business organizations and also clearly depicts the price to earning proportions and ratios. It has been found that this model is less popular because no significant research had been carried out using this particular model in the field of research. In the year 2013, a new model has been introduced and also has become a special point of interest in many research fields. The scholars and the researchers like Hsu and Lawrence (2016), use this method the most in the finance studies and the accounting studies. It is more focused on the analysis of the impact of the marketing related events on the financial markets. This literature map would be useful for the division of the research articles into three different methodologies. However, the research papers can also be divided on the basis of different approaches and models. The next section of the paper will discuss this in detail.

The Research Questions, Theories and Methods

The research questions, theories and methods

It is true that for the conduction of the academic research in any sphere, it is highly useful to have alternative research processes. This is because it can conclude various quality results which might have been absent if the entire research has only concentrated on a single model or theory. Likewise, the understanding of different factors associated to the brand equity of the firm and its impacts on the stock process of the company and the researchers have equally utilized different models. The article listed in the first table have used different models and known as the independent variables in order to study their influence on a specific dependant variable which is the value of the firm measured by unnecessary stock returns.

Author	Research Questions	Methodology used
Bartsch, Riefler and Diamantopoulos (2016)	The financial value impact of the perpetual brand attributes	Case study approach
Çifci et al.  (2016)	The performance of the firm’s stock market which possess high value companies.	Frame French three factor  model
Davvetas and Diamantopoulos (2016)	Do the stakeholders actually profit from the brands	Event study process
Godey et al. (2016)	The market reaction to the corporate change of names	Case study approach
Hsu and Lawrence (2016)	The  relevance of the brand attitude in the markets of high technology	Market value model
Kumar (2016)	The financial information of the perceived quality	The time series model
Liu and Chou (2016)	The effects of brand value announcements on the stock return.	Case study approach
Liu  et al. (2016)	The capital market evaluation and the brand value	Market value model
Mohd Suki (2016)	A test of two of the brand value models	Y & R BAV Model
Oguztimur and Akturan (2016)	The brand positioning associations with the brand value	Case study approach
Christodoulides, Cadogan and Veloutsou (2015)	The performance of the global brands in after the globalization.	Market value model
Sasmita and Mohd Suk (2015)		Case study approach

Some authors have put their effort on the investigation of whether a brand’s perceived quality through the customers have a prolonged gain in the profitability of the firm’s measures having used the stock return response model. This model mainly puts efforts to investigate and infuse all the methods of accounting related to a company and also the performance of the capital market or the stock returns. This research paper has also used the time series analytical methodology in order to depict the fact that when few data points are gathered and used, they can be easily accounted for the for the pre-structure inter relation. These are automatically correlated, distributed uniformly in the various trends or the variations. The variables employed in the research paper were the quality perception of the customers, expenditures on the customers and the brand awareness of the companies selected. These were the independent variables. Among the dependable variables, for this research was the ROI or the return on investment that is actually the bulk of returns an investor receives after investing in the stock of a specific company. The findings state that there is a positive correlation between the ROI and the perceived quality by the customers. It further demonstrates that when a company succeeds in retaining the quality standards through a long period of time for the products and service which they offer, they can easily generate the returns in future. However, there is no such remarkable relation found between the ROI and the salience. The results for the advertisement were with insufficient data collected for the expenditure on the advertisement since the author was not able to find data from all the firms.

Another important research has been conducted in exploring the brand positioning and the brand value share by using the market value model approach. After viewing the brand value in this manner, the researchers have put effort on the incorporation of both tangible and intangible related factors with the brand. The research paper is also descriptive of the cross correlation done by the Financial World Magazine regarding the brand value estimation. Founded on the similar model, anther research has been conducted. This research also depicted an optimistic connection between the estimations of the brand value with the stock value of the company but the variables which are taken for this particular paper were the operating limits of the company and its remarkable share in the market.  In order to generate robust findings, the researchers have rebalanced the portfolio.

Prior to examining the articles, it would be essential to mention that most of the studies related to the financial evaluations observe both the qualitative and quantitative data collection method. The main aim of this method is to anticipate, investigate and explain the association between the various sets of variables and to analyze probable influences on the results. As a difference to the qualitative methods, the quantitative method employs a larger sample size in order to check the numerical data by the help of comparing or searching the correlation among the attributes of the sample in order to generalize the results with a target group or a population. Hence, the current paper has tried to analyze the various methodologies applied in the quantitative approach with their limitations too.

Christodoulides, G., Cadogan, J.W. and Veloutsou, C., 2015. Consumer-based brand equity measurement: lessons learned from an international study. International Marketing Review, 32(3/4), pp.307-328.

This particular paper analyzes the role of Aaker’s strong conceptualization of the consumer-based brand equity that includes brand awareness, brand loyalty, perceived quality and brand association in a multi – European context and also highlights the serious lessons along with the evaluation of the brand assets across any countries. The methodology or approach used by this paper this that the cross -category data was gathered through a different survey which took two months from a representative sample of the customers on three of the European countries like UK, Greece and Germany. The brand equity was found to be the specification of the constituents of the customer based dimensions and the brand awareness, perceived quality and associations and brand loyalty. According to Aaker, there were no need to develop a measure for this. Although there were other researchers, who have validated the sales around the dimensions of Aaker, it is ntable that none were beyond facing problems (Christodoulides, Cadogan and Veloutsou 2015). Hence, instead of depending in single available measure of brand equity, the different measures from various studies are brought about in this paper in order to expand the item pool and evaluate the measures of Aaker’s notions.

 The brand awareness, perceived quality, brand loyalty and association were transformed into short questions and were sent to a group of experts to be examined to the face validity. The respondents to the invitation were eight experts specifically the senior academics and with remarkable publishers in the field of brand equity.  The questionnaire was at first pre-tested on the sample of students in the UK. After that, the instrument was “back translated” into Greek and German by the academics of the marketing and the native speakers of Greece and Germany with English fluency (Christodoulides, Cadogan and Veloutsou 2015). There were quotas set for the gender and age based on the country census data in order to ensure the samples which were collected from various areas each country populations. The recruitment of the respondents was done by the fieldworkers who were residents of the selected countries. Data was collected from various locations of the countries. Each respondent was asked to choose their favorite brand from the categories. The request to the respondents to respond to the question asked to them were evaluated properly.

This type of research methodology is useful in the field of academic research and in this paper it has facilitated the consumer –based brand equity dimensionality. The questionnaire method has been useful in the research field to gather the quantitative data. This is advantageous because it is the most-low cost way to reach people and a generous approach too. There is less printing cost and there is no need to hire the surveyors to ask questions to people. Next, the questionnaires are practical and flexible along with being inexpensive. The groups are targeted and managed in various ways. The short questionnaires are useful in picking the question and answering swiftly.

The research paper has its limitations which in turn might pave way for further research. The paper has depicted the concern over the importance of Aaker’s conceptualization of the brand equity that is consumer based across the countries of Europe along with the product categories. The findings of the research must be verified on the basis of other diverse contexts. They could have also identified the fluctuation in their brand equity levels and at the same time take necessary actions (Christodoulides, Cadogan and Veloutsou 2015). The limitations of the research method are- dishonesty can be perpetuated by the questionnaire type of methodology. The respondents who answered the questions might not be truthful completely. It can be initiated by several reasons such as the social desirability, attempt to protect privacy and biasness. There might be lack of conscientious responses from the respondents or the respondents might not have thought about the answers before answering them (Christodoulides, Cadogan and Veloutsou 2015). There might be differences in the understanding an interpretation of the answers. Each answer might have different interpretations in terms of the questions. The respondents also might have faced trouble in grasping the meaning of the question which might seem clear to the question setter.

Sasmita, J. and Mohd Suki, N., 2015. Young consumers’ insights on brand equity: Effects of brand association, brand loyalty, brand awareness, and brand image. International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, 43(3), pp.276-292.

The modern business organizations are facing the impact of the brand awareness and the brand loyalty in a significant manner. The intention of the customers’ purchases along with the repetitive purchases of the customers are notably influenced by the brand awareness or the brand loyalty of any particular organization. This is the main reason behind strong emphasis of the modern day organizations in the improvement of the brand image and the brand equity. It is observed that the preferences of the customers in purchasing, are significantly influenced by the above mentioned aspects of the business. In order to assess the young consumer’s insights regarding the brand image, brand equity, brand loyalty, brand awareness and the impact of the brand association, Sasmita and Mohd Suki (2015) researched and was able to form few hypothesis like the brand association, brand loyalty, brand awareness and the brand image have positive impact on the brand equity.   

In the research, the data which was analysed, was gathered by a self-administered questionnaire. The number of questionnaires sent for the responses to the full time students in several public universities of Penang were 250 in number. This was conducted within the time span of two week starting from 16^th July to 30^th July of 2013. The convenience sampling technique was utilized to collect 200 responses with an 80 percent response rate. As Roscoe in the year 1975 was able to confirm that the sampling size of 30 to 500 samples are usually considered as satisfactory, the sample size for the mentioned research is reasonable. The young consumers who were generally the full time students with a smartphone which portrays that he or she is a member of the digital generation and actively participates in the social networking and also had significant experience of purchasing products from the world known brands like Adidas, Levi’s, Puma and Nike in the last 1 year, were the main focus of the sample size. The selection of the brands needs to be from a specific criteria may that be the casual wear or the sports clothes. The main focus in the selection of the brands is to make sure that they belong to a particular sector of analysis. Apart from this, the researchers were observed to confirm that the participation of the respondents are voluntary.

The researchers constructed the structure of the close ended questionnaire which was used in the research with three different sections in the form of the section A, section B and finally the section C. The section A of the questionnaire included the questions regarding the demographic profile of the respondents including the age, sex, race and the school of the respondents. The section B comprised with the questions regarding the specific experience of the respondent with the products of the mentioned brand and the section C was significantly filled with questions regarding the factors that affect the brand equity. The structure of the section C was adapted from Ling (2013) and the various aspects of the social media were included as a modification of the items of the section C in accordance to the domain of the study. The implementation of the 5 point Likert scale was observed for answering of the questionnaire items. The five point Likert scale was seen to range from Strongly agree to Strongly Disagree. The data gathered in the research, were analysed using the various analytical methods like the descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, factor analysis and multiple regression analysis and was conducted using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences version 21. The main objective of implementing the factor analysis was to categorize and summarize the related information into a considerably smaller set of underlying factors. In case of the Pearson correlations, the main motive is to check the correlations between the variables, present in the responses while the impact of the independent variables like the brand image, awareness, loyalty and the brand association on the dependent variable like the brand equity on the young customers are evaluated using the multiple regression analysis.

The research was partially fit and had multiple constraints. The research included responses of 200 full time students that are taking their education from various public universities of Penang, Malaysia. Hence it can be said that the selected respondents are significantly small to represent the whole community or the people of Malaysia. The improvement in the generalizability issue of the research can only be achieved by expanding the sample size of the research. On top of this, the honesty of the respondents in communicating what they feel regarding the research questions is a prime concern for the researchers as well.

The simultaneous conduction of the investigation of the hypothesized relationships along with the process of confirming the factor by confirmatory factor analysis, evaluation of the model fitness by the goodness of fit indices and the assessment of the convergent and the discriminant validity at first hand could have been achieved by using the multivariate data analysis like the structural equation modelling technique. This was significantly missing in the research in order to provide the advancement of the analysis.     

Conclusion

After the conduction of a detailed analysis on the field of international marketing and the components of it such as brand equity, brand awareness, brand positioning and brand loyalty, it can be concluded that it is an extremely vast field with a variety of potential for further research. The paper has tried to elaborate the methodologies used in the study of international marketing and other factors which leave impact on them. After the critical analysis of the two articles above, it can be said that these articles are highly related to the chosen topic and justify its efforts. However, the future papers would take up a particular country and analyze its business development in the contemporary globalized market.

Bartsch, F., Riefler, P. and Diamantopoulos, A., 2016. A taxonomy and review of positive consumer dispositions toward foreign countries and globalization. Journal of International Marketing, 24(1), pp.82-110.

Christodoulides, G., Cadogan, J.W. and Veloutsou, C., 2015. Consumer-based brand equity measurement: lessons learned from an international study. International Marketing Review, 32(3/4), pp.307-328.

Çifci, S., Ekinci, Y., Whyatt, G., Japutra, A., Molinillo, S. and Siala, H., 2016. A cross validation of Consumer-Based Brand Equity models: Driving customer equity in retail brands. Journal of Business Research, 69(9), pp.3740-3747.

Davvetas, V. and Diamantopoulos, A., 2016. How product category shapes preferences toward global and local brands: A schema theory perspective. Journal of international marketing, 24(4), pp.61-81.

Godey, B., Manthiou, A., Pederzoli, D., Rokka, J., Aiello, G., Donvito, R. and Singh, R., 2016. Social media marketing efforts of luxury brands: Influence on brand equity and consumer behavior. Journal of business research, 69(12), pp.5833-5841.

Hsu, L. and Lawrence, B., 2016. The role of social media and brand equity during a product recall crisis: A shareholder value perspective. International journal of research in Marketing, 33(1), pp.59-77.

Kumar, P., 2016. State of green marketing research over 25 years (1990-2014) Literature survey and classification. Marketing Intelligence & Planning, 34(1), pp.137-158.

Liu, C.H.S. and Chou, S.F., 2016. Tourism strategy development and facilitation of integrative processes among brand equity, marketing and motivation. Tourism Management, 54, pp.298-308.

Liu, S., Perry, P., Moore, C. and Warnaby, G., 2016. The standardization-localization dilemma of brand communications for luxury fashion retailers’ internationalization into China. Journal of Business Research, 69(1), pp.357-364.

Mohd Suki, N., 2016. Green product purchase intention: impact of green brands, attitude, and knowledge. British Food Journal, 118(12), pp.2893-2910.

Oguztimur, S. and Akturan, U., 2016. Synthesis of city branding literature (1988–2014) as a research domain. International Journal of Tourism Research, 18(4), pp.357-372.

Sasmita, J. and Mohd Suki, N., 2015. Young consumers’ insights on brand equity: Effects of brand association, brand loyalty, brand awareness, and brand image. International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, 43(3), pp.276-292.