With controversial comments such as these, published in the Journal of International Management, Rugman (see also Collinson and Rugman, 2008, Rugman and Verbeke, 2004 and Rugman and Verbeke, 2008b) set off a regionalization vs. globalization debate in the international business literature. Based on the notion that global success demands that companies successfully operate in the triad of North America, Europe and Asia Pacific (Ohmae, 1985), Rugman and Verbeke (2004) analyzed sales for Fortune 500 companies across these regions and found that only 9 companies could be seen as ‘global’ in the sense that they derived substantial proportions of their sales (i.e., at least 20%) from each of the three regions in the triad. A staggering majority of 84.2% of those companies could only be categorized as ‘regional’ as they achieved an average of 80.3% of their sales in their home region of the triad (Rugman and Verbeke, 2004: 7). Rugman and Verbeke concluded that the fact that sales were so unevenly spread across different regions reflected the existence of regionally different market positions which demanded equally different competitive strategies (Rugman and Verbeke, 2004: 6). As a consequence, the authors questioned the academic focus on globalization and called for future research on the regional rather than global level of international business strategy.2
This paper responds to this call by focusing on the regional level of one of the main questions in international management from the marketing perspective (Boddewyn and Grosse, 1995, Jain, 1989, Terpstra and Sarathy, 2000 and Walters, 1986): the standardization vs. localization decision. Discussion of this decision has been ongoing for five decades, from Donnelly and Ryans, 1969, DuBois and Reeb, 2000, Duncan and Ramaprasad, 1995, Dunn, 1976, Dunning et al., 2007, Fastoso and Whitelock, 2007, Fisk et al., 1993, Fraser and Hite, 1990, Gencturk et al., 1995, Ghauri and Cateora, 2005, Graham et al., 1993, Griffith et al., 2003, Harris, 1994, Henthorne et al., 1998, Hill and James, 1989, Hite and Fraser, 1988, Hollensen, 2007, Hult et al., 1997, Hult et al., 2008a, Hult et al., 2008b, Jain, 1989, James and Hill, 1991, Javalgi et al., 1994, Javalgi et al., 1995, Kacker, 1972, Kanso, 1992, Kanso and Nelson, 2002, Karande et al., 2006, Katsikeas et al., 2006, Kirpalani et al., 1988, Kobrin, 1994, Koudelova and Whitelock, 2001, Laroche et al., 2001, Levitt, 1983, Lovelock and Yip, 1996, Martenson, 1987, Matthews, 2005, Melewar et al., 2000, Michell, 1979, Mueller, 1987, Mueller, 1989, Mueller, 1991a, Mueller, 1991b, Nakata and Huang, 2005, Ohmae, 1985, Okazaki et al., 2006 and Okazaki et al., 2007. Most standardization research has been focused on advertising (Jain, 1989, Onkvisit and Shaw, 1999 and Walters, 1986) and recent literature reviews (Fastoso and Whitelock, 2007, Taylor and Johnson, 2002 and Waheeduzzaman and Dube, 2004) as well as empirical studies (Griffith et al., 2003, Samiee et al., 2003 and Taylor and Okazaki, 2006) demonstrate that the issue is still very much of concern.
Our analysis of nearly five decades of advertising standardization research has shown that, of the 56 studies published since 1969, only approximately a fifth was regionally focused. However, over time, the geographic focus of the studies shifted from the international to the regional level. Whereas in the first 20 years of research on advertising standardization only 8.3% of studies (1 in 12) took a regional focus, that percentage rose to 25% (11 in 44) over the last 19 years and to 36.8% (7 in 19) over the last decade. This shift appears to be timely given that, although globalization cannot be fully denied (Stevens and Bird, 2004), most MNEs appear to be competing on a largely regional rather than global level (Rugman and Verbeke, 2004, Collinson and Rugman, 2008 and Rugman and Oh, 2008).
There are five main findings from our analysis. Firstly, studies of regional advertising standardization have so far focused on three regions of the world: Western Europe, (Chinese) Asia, and the Middle East/Arab world. Secondly, research in Europe has shown that full standardization of advertising is the exception rather than the rule and that partially standardized advertising is most common (cf. Koudelova and Whitelock, 2001 and Whitelock and Chung, 1989). Thirdly, regional standardization seems to be taking place more frequently for strategic than for tactical advertising decisions (Melewar et al., 2000, Tai, 1997 and Tai, 1998). Fourthly, cultural similarities do not lead to advertising with identical information content within a region (Cutler et al., 1992 and Karande et al., 2006). Results from the Arab world further suggest that socioeconomic differences between countries such as disposable income may be responsible for differences in information content and hence “override” any potential for standardization derived from cultural similarities (Karande et al., 2006). Finally, as is demonstrated in the findings discussed above, regional studies of standardization have with one exception (Zandpour and Harich, 1996) focused on a single region.
