Regionalization vs. globalization in advertising research: Insights from fivedecades of academic study

摘要

This paper is a response to calls for more research into the regional-as opposed to global-levelof international business operations (Rugman and Verbeke, 2004). Focusing on a key issue ininternational management, the standardization decision, this paper presents a systematicreview of top journal articles published over the last five decades on the subject of advertisingstandardization at the regional level. The results of this review demonstrate that in the lastdecade studies have frequently taken a regional rather than international focus of analysis,suggesting a shift in research in line with regionalization theory. However, this study alsoshows that research on regional standardization has lacked consistency in relation to how thephenomenon should be defined and measured. We present a conceptualization ofmeasurement approaches to international advertising standardization, propose a typology ofapproaches and discuss their implications for knowledge advancement in the area.