تاثیر محیط صنعتی در تصمیم گیری های ورود به بازار اولیه توسط مدیران B2B در ایالات متحده و ژاپن

Managers form simplified mental models to cope with market environment uncertainties and to process information. A critical decision is whether to enter a high-potential market early. Large innovation and development investments involved in this decision increase uncertainty. We examine the importance ascribed by U.S. and Japanese managers to competitive forces when making early market entry decisions. We expect that the competitive forces will have different effects on the likelihood of early market entry in the U.S. versus Japan due to cultural and business environment differences, and we thereby develop several propositions. We develop a decision-making exercise simulating early market entry decisions, and tested our propositions with managers in medium to large business-to-business (B2B) firms from both countries. We assessed impacts of the competitive market forces on entry strategy selection via relative weights, repeated-measures analysis of variance, and frequency analysis. Our findings revealed differences in the mental models of Japanese and U.S. managers. Buyer power had a larger effect on the decision to make an early market entry for Japanese managers, while threat of new firm entry had a larger effect for U.S. managers; these findings were consistent with our propositions. We also found several areas of agreement between U.S. and Japanese managers. We conclude with theoretical implications and recommendations to B2B management.

In the global business environment facing today's business-to-business (B2B) marketing manager, the decision of when to enter a particular market with a new product has become extremely complex. The first mover usually requires considerable investment in innovation and has greater risk exposure, but potentially captures a leadership position in the market and achieves sustainable competitive advantage (Lieberman and Montgomery, 1988 and Lieberman and Montgomery, 1998). Later entrants face their own set of risks, but may learn from the first mover's mistakes (Schnaars, 1991 and Song et al., 1999). The market entry decision must be timed to balance the risks of premature entry against the missed opportunity of late entry. Complicating the decision task is the fact that managers are typically working in uncertain, ambiguous environments in which it may be quite difficult for them to communicate their conceptual processes (Gartner et al., 1992 and Hill and Levenhagen, 1995). B2B market entry decisions are further complicated by the fact that managers working within multiple cultural or business environments may exhibit different ways of responding to competitive threats and opportunities. Cross-cultural managerial studies indicate that enduring cultural traits influence managerial perceptions and actions (Tan and Farley, 1987, Tse et al., 1988, Kotabe et al., 1991, Ralston et al., 1993 and Smith et al., 1996). In addition to cultural differences, governmental policies or other factors in the business environment will differ as well; these differences will also affect managerial decision making as they may make some opportunities more or less attractive. B2B managers therefore cannot assume that foreign competitors will view the global market the same way they do. Japanese and U.S. B2B managers may use different criteria in deciding whether to make an early market entry into a potential new market, because they simplify and understand the complex competitive environment within which they work differently (Porac & Thomas, 1990). That is, they may place different levels of importance on the competitive forces when assessing the environment, and may consequently view the same market as more or less attractive. Few studies have examined the market entry strategy decision across different cultural or business environments, and even fewer have specifically examined this decision in the B2B context. The research findings reveal interesting differences and also concordances in the early market entry decisions as made by managers of Japanese and U.S. B2B firms. A simple, robust model of the competitive environment is Porter's five competitive forces model (Porter, 1980). In this model, the many competitive threats, barriers and uncertainties faced by a firm are subsumed into five forces: the intensity of competitive rivalry, the threat of new entrants, the bargaining power of suppliers and of buyers, and the threat of substitute products. Though it has not generally been used in academic research to model likelihood of early market entry, the Porter model has been validated and frequently used in previous research as an effective representation of competitive activity that models managers' assessments of competition (Porter, 1980, Porter, 1985 and Schnaars, 1991) and we will use it as a concise way to describe competitive scenarios to our decision-maker respondents. In this study, we seek to determine if there are cross-national differences between U.S. and Japanese B2B managers regarding their likelihoods of making an early market entry into a competitive market. Due to differences in the cultural and business environments between the U.S. and Japan, we expect that managers will differ in their likelihoods of entering a market early. We use the Porter model to specify the characteristics of the competitive environment. We propose a descriptive, qualitative model to assess the importance of different environmental characteristics on the likelihood of entering a new market early, and how this importance differs between B2B managers in the U.S. and Japan. We develop four propositions concerning expected differences in decision making, based on differences in the cultural and business environments in the U.S. and Japan. We then test our propositions with a sample of 142 U.S. and 206 Japanese managers in medium to large B2B firms. To do this, we present different scenarios of competitive structure (based on Porter's five forces model) to managers, and elicit their likelihoods of early market entry. We use a judgmental analysis approach, based in multiple criteria behavioral decision theory, to assess the importance of the environmental characteristics to the early market entry decision. Our approach, which is computationally equivalent to multilevel modeling in hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), converts their stated likelihoods of early market entry into standardized relative weights, which represent how important each force is to the early market entry decision, and identify significant cross-national differences in assigned weights using repeated-measures analysis of variance. We also use regression analysis to determine the direction of relationships between competitive force and likelihood of early market entry. We expect differences between U.S. and Japanese B2B managers in their likelihoods of early market entry; these cross-national differences will be reflected in different amounts of importance being assigned to the competitive forces in the Porter model. We believe this is the first empirical study that uses the Porter model to assess the relative importance of various aspects of the competitive environment in a cross-national, business-to-business setting. We also further explore cross-national differences in decision making by examining frequencies of weight patterns. We conclude with a discussion of theoretical implications of our results and recommendations for B2B managerial practice.

Managerial decisions on early market entry have been extensively examined in the marketing and management literature. The optimal choices in the early market entry strategy have been previously shown to be dependent on many external factors. In the business environment facing today's B2B firm, it is increasingly important to understand that global competitors based in different parts of the world may use different mental models to grasp the competitive environment due to cultural and/or business environment differences. In this study, we have investigated two broad issues related to early market entry: the relative importance of the competitive forces in influencing the likelihood of early market entry, and whether these decisions are affected by country of origin. A greater understanding of how foreign competition makes market entry decisions will be helpful to managers in today's increasingly global B2B marketplace.