International New Ventures: Innovativeness and Adaptation of Marketing Strategies

The global growth process of rapidly internationalizing firms, in this study referred as International New Ventures (INV), has aroused plentiful of interest in research during the last few years. Especially, the entrepreneurial characteristics towards management in these firms and their influence on the growth and performance have been studied extensively. Marketing strategies, however, have not gained much attention although vast differences can be assumed to exist between small entrepreneurial firms that expand to global markets almost instantly after inception, and traditional firms with more gradual internationalization patterns. Consequently, marketing strategies of INVs are investigated in this study to elaborate which factors influence these strategies and how they should be aligned with global growth process. Innovativeness and adaptation are suggested as marketing strategy dimensions that vary between different stages of INVs’ global growth and are affected by the external environment as well as owned or leveraged resources and capabilities. Literature review is conducted based on existing findings related to INV and Born Global phenomena as well as studies investigating entrepreneurial marketing strategies. Empirical part of this study encompasses a deductive, explanatory research approach and utilizes quantitative research method. Primary data is gathered from answers acquired through an online survey of 201 Finnish INVs. Findings from the survey indicate that global growth stage has a significant influence on the innovativeness and adaptation of INVs’ marketing strategies. Innovativeness and standardization of marketing strategy increase as INVs proceed from early to latter global growth stages. Marketing performance increases accordingly. Furthermore, INVs’ network capabilities as well as market change, globalization and industry growth have a significant influence on the degree of innovativeness and adaptation of INVs’ marketing strategies. Consequently, INVs need to consider these factors when developing their marketing strategies.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format