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International Market Selection and Segmentation II
Edited by Nicolas Papadopoulos and Oscar Martín Martín
1. Introduction
The identification of promising foreign target markets is a critical issue in international marketing and international business research, strategy and management. Its capital importance arises from the fact that its inter-relationships with other strategic decisions, such as mode of entry ([39] Koch, 2001), foreign marketing programmes ([49] Papadopoulos and Denis, 1988) and, ultimately, success and performance ([7] Brouthers et al. , 2009) have been widely acknowledged. The evaluation of foreign target markets has been approached from two complementary levels: first, a market (country) perspective usually under the stream of research called "international market selection" (IMS) (e.g. [6] Brewer, 2001; [51] Rahman, 2003) and second, a consumer perspective, which can be labeled "international consumer segmentation" (e.g. [37] Kamakura et al. , 1994; [40] Kolman et al. , 2003) and involves the segmentation of consumers across countries. This paper is a step toward a higher integration of both perspectives by proposing a two-stage model of IMS and segmentation in the process leading to the identification of promising European target markets.
Most IMS and segmentation studies use a diversity of data such as economic, geographical, political, cultural, etc. variables (e.g. [68] Whitelock and Jobber, 2004). Consumer data, however, and especially the concept of values are under-investigated despite their relevance and robustness in cross-cultural research. In IMS, the lack of attention to consumer values is particularly acute, since neither the old nor most of the recent studies consider them. An exception is the work by [55] Sakarya et al. (2007) which includes Hofstede's work-related values-based framework to measure cultural distance in their preliminary assessment of promising emerging markets. However, these researchers state (p. 218):
Although the importance and impact of culture on IMS has been explicitly recognized through the psychic distance construct in internationalization literature, neither the traditional models nor the normative market selection process models incorporate it as a significant dimension into the screening process.
In international segmentation, studies using consumer data are also under-represented ([62] Steenkamp and Ter Hofstede, 2002) presumably because of the difficulty and cost involved in its collection. Nevertheless, consumer characteristics and values provide relevant information for managerial decisions when identifying both important and stable international segments ([8]...