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and is the recipient of the Ian Kirk Scholarship. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and German and her Bachelor of Business in Marketing (Honours) from Monash University. Her areas of interest include co-creation, service and experience marketing and branding. Joanna has published in the Journal of Services Marketing.

The authors propose a conceptual model of the psychic distance-organizational performance relationship that incorporates organizational factors (international experience and centralization of decision making), entry strategy, and retail strategy implications. The findings suggest that when entering psychically distant markets, retailers should adopt lowcost/low-control entry strategies and adapt their retail strategy to a greater extent than in psychically close markets. However, the authors find that such strategic responses have an adverse effect on performance. They find that international experience, psychic distance, entry strategy, and retail strategy adaptation are significant drivers of organizational performance and factors that determine critical success in international retailing.Psychic distance has attracted heightened research interest of both a conceptual and empirical nature over the past decade. Much of the recent literature in the field of psychic distance has concentrated on the conceptualization and operationalization of the construct (Brewer 2007;Dow 2000; Dow and Karunaratna 2006; Evans and Mavondo 2002;Sousa and Bradley 2006), but few researchers agree on the empirical usefulness of psychic distance. In the current literature, there is no clear consensus regarding the role of psychic distance, or its constituent elements, in determining foreign market selection (Stottinger and

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Research into firm internationalisation has identified psychic distance as a key factor in explaining variations in both expansion patterns and organisational performance. Despite the substantial growth in research on the internationalisation of retailing, most contributions have been highly descriptive and generally bereft of coherent theoretical frameworks. This paper postulates that the psychic distance concept may provide an appropriate theoretical framework to explain variations in the organisational performance of retailers operating in the international arena. It is recognised that psychic distance alone cannot explain variations between countries in retailers' performance. Other factors, such as the strategic decision making process, entry strategy adopted, the nature of the retail offer and the extent of adaptation, and organisational and managerial characteristics also influence the organisational performance of international retailers.