International Marketing Capabilities: The Roles of Organizational Un-inertia and Strategic Flexibility

International marketing scholars have debated the merits of standardization versus adaptation for many years. We address this debate by identifying opposing forces, namely an inertia force to use proven strategies and products in new international markets (standardization) versus an open minded, flexibility-based force driving exporters to adopt strategies and products to new international territories (adaptation). Theoretically, Day (2011) identified several barriers to adapting marketing capabilities and termed them organizational rigidities: organizational inertia (successful experience that locks the organization into a dominant approach) and lagging reaction (how quickly is an organization willing and able to react to verifiable shifts in the market). Accordingly, since international marketing capabilities are more explorative than domestic ones, these rigidities might have stronger impacts. Hence, in the core of this research is the belief that organizational un-inertia (used here to denote low levels of organizational inertia) and strategic flexibility enhance the development of superior international marketing capabilities. Our model also includes cultural distance as a moderator of the relationship between un-inertia/flexibility and international marketing capabilities.