Configuration and coordination of international marketing activities

Stefan Schmid, Philipp Grosche and Ulrike Mayrhofer (ulrike.mayrhofer@univ-cotedazur.fr)
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Stefan Schmid: ESCP Europe - Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Paris
Philipp Grosche: ESCP Europe - Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Paris
Ulrike Mayrhofer: MAGELLAN - Laboratoire de Recherche Magellan - UJML - Université Jean Moulin - Lyon 3 - Université de Lyon - Institut d'Administration des Entreprises (IAE) - Lyon

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Abstract: With this paper, we contribute to the literature of configuration and coordination in international firms. While previous literature emphasized that headquarters decide upon the configuration and coordination of their foreign subsidiaries, we suggest that the configuration-coordination decision takes place at the level of activities. With a focus on international marketing activities, our study on German firms from the automotive industry comes up with the following major findings: (1) With respect to configuration, firms tend to centralise the planning and the control of marketing activities, but to decentralise the implementation of marketing activities. (2) For the coordination of marketing activities, direct personal supervision and informal communication are preferred to other approaches, such as socialisation or formal bureaucratic coordination. (3) When combining configuration and coordination of marketing activities, we identified distinct clusters. Firms that have a high decentralization of marketing activities and that use a high level of coordination yield better coordination results than firms from other configuration-coordination clusters.

Keywords: International value chain; international configuration; international coordination; international marketing activities; automotive industry. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published in International Business Review, 2016, 25 (2), pp.535-547

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01274899

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