Tarim, Emre and Mouzas, Stefanos (2017) Marketing your country : Categorical imperative vs Captive Marketing? In: British Academy of Management 2017 conference, 2017-09-04 - 2017-09-07, Warwick University. (Unpublished)
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
This developmental paper discusses the national intermediaries’ marketing and strategy work in international business networks. Intermediaries’ work has been conceptualized as product critiquing along categories such as product, service, company, and sector. The intermediaries are conceptualized as evaluators who, on behalf of their clients, asses the convergence of the evaluated entity with the category features and metrics, and engender a categorical imperative for the evaluated entity. The intermediaries as product critiques narrows down the intermediaries’ work to evaluation without much consideration given to intermediaries’ marketing and strategy work. Moreover, the theory does not explain what happens when the intermediaries become captive marketers- namely, being restricted to one market and its products and services, all of which might be evaluated unfavourably. The paper discusses the marketing and strategy work of such captive marketers in the case of financial analysts and salespeople in an emerging market who serve international investors that invest in multiple markets.