International Marketing: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

This is the third edition of Marketing: Theory and Practice and yet this edition is the first to feature a chapter on International Marketing. When the second edition was published (1983), research in international marketing was fragmentary and exploratory without a strong theoretical framework (Boddewyn, 1981; Cavusgil and Nevin, 1981; and, Albaum and Peterson, 1984). However, Aulakh and Kotaabe (1993) in their article ‘An Assessment of Theoretical and Methodological Development in International Marketing: 1980–1990’ concluded that there had been ‘substantial progress both in the development of conceptual frameworks for the studies conducted and in the empirical testing of concepts and theories’. Their detailed review of 893 published international marketing articles showed that researchers had focused on the following issues: the marketing environment (155 articles)Marketing management (452 articles)the internationalisation process (87 articles)consumer behaviour (84 articles)collaborative business arrangements (49 articles), andglobalisation (66 articles).