Psychic distance is a key element in the field of international marketing. Unfortunately, the literature exhibits a lack of consistency with respect to its effects. To help increase understanding of the influence of psychic distance, the authors investigate business and cultural psychic distance as separate constructs. They develop a model in which an export manager's business and cultural psychic distance influences the structuring of the export relationship (i.e., whether it has complementarity of capabilities) and explore whether business and cultural psychic distance enhances or dampens the leveraging of complementary capabilities to increase an export manager's satisfaction with export performance. The results, based on a survey of 151 U.S. export managers, indicate that when export managers perceive greater business psychic distance, they select export partners with fewer complementary capabilities. Although more complementarity of capabilities results in greater satisfaction with export performance, this relationship is moderated by psychic distance. Specifically, greater cultural psychic distance enhances the positive influence of partner complementarity of capabilities on satisfaction with export performance, whereas greater business psychic distance dampens the positive influence of partner complementarity of capabilities on satisfaction with export performance.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between bilateral country reputation and export volume to the country in which that reputation is held. Design/methodology/approach The unique bilateral data set consists of 861 country pairs. Country reputation measures are from a global survey, in which respondents in 20 countries rate the reputation for products and people of 50 other countries. This data set is then analyzed against actual export data for each country-pair using the well-established structural gravity model of international trade. Findings The authors find that each improvement in a world ranking of a country’s reputation for products (in a target country) is associated with a 2 percent increase in exports to that particular country; the effect is equivalent to the importing country decreasing a tariff by as much as 2.9 percent. Furthermore, the authors find that different aspects of country reputation – for its products and its people – attenuate distinct forms of uncertainty, and thereby stimulate export volume in distinct ways. Research limitations/implications This study shows that the relationship between country reputation and export volume is a substantive and empirically valid topic of study. For public policy makers looking to stimulate exports to a specific country, improving their respective country’s reputation in that country appears to be a viable alternative to other levers (e.g. trade negotiations, free trade agreements). For business leaders at international companies, the findings suggest that companies may consider country reputation as a factor when choosing to which countries they wish to expand. Originality/value The notion that country reputation can contribute to aggregate export volume has intuitive appeal. Yet, aside from research on country-of-origin effects which has concentrated on the individual consumer level, the notion of country reputation contributing to aggregate effects has so far been based mostly on conjecture and anecdotal evidence. This is the only study to the authors’ knowledge that empirically tests this relationship using a bilateral measure of reputation as a determinant of export volume within one of the most successful empirical frameworks, the structural gravity model of international trade. The findings suggest that for many countries, their reputation may contribute to billions of dollars in export volume.

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The argument over standardization versus adaptation of marketing strategy in international markets has raged for several decades. This argument has generally taken place at the aggregate level to include all four strategic areas of the marketing mix (product, price, promotion, and place) taken together. This article disaggregates the standardization-versus-adaptation argument by focusing on just one strategic area of the marketing mix-channel strategy. We argue that three underlying phenomena or forces in global markets (culturally distant distribution behavior, distributive institution rigidity, and international functional fragmentation) inhibit a firm's ability to standardize channel strategy in global markets to a greater degree than is the case for product, price, and promotional strategies.

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