Standardisation versus Adaptation: A Study of the Factors Initiating and Influencing the Process of Strategic Migration

Abstract

Despite nearly eight decades of debate on the topic of international marketing strategy standardisation/adaptation, the subject of strategic migration has yet to be explored. It is this deficit that has spurred the authors to study this phenomenon. As such, this study explores the process of strategic migration within a firm’s international marketing strategy, with the purpose of investigating, describing and assessing the factors that initiate and influence it. In order to achieve this, three research questions were asked: To what degree do firms migrate between international marketing strategies within the framework of standardisation and adaptation? How does the process of strategic migration transpire? Why do firms undertake the process to migrate from a standardised to an adapted international marketing strategy, or vice versa? This study takes an abductive research approach using a number of transdisciplinary theoretical concepts, including Strategic Change, Standardisation/Adaptation, and Factors Affecting Standardisation/Adaptation, to create a theoretical framework. The empirical part of this study undertakes an in-depth investigation of a single-case company, MalacoLeaf, where the strategic migration of one of its key strategic brands is described in terms of the content, process and context of strategic migration. In confronting theoretical propositions against the empirical research findings, this study discovered that in terms of the content, solely the product components of the firm’s international marketing strategy underwent migration from a standardised to an adapted strategy. In addition, the study found that the process of strategic migration must be seen as a chain of interrelated events with different factors influencing the process at different stages. This study also found that, in terms of context, it was not a single factor that initiated or influenced the firm to migrate strategies but a combination of multiple factors. Based on this study’s findings, the authors present a conceptualisation of the process of strategic migration, showing the interrelationship of multifarious factors which can impact a firm’s decision to migrate strategies. These findings have proven to be very insightful and can serve as a foundation and strong incentive for subsequent research on the subject of strategic migration.