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EDITORIAL

A Looking to Asia and beyond
Kim-Shyan Fam     Zhilin Yang      Kamal Ghose

The Asian region contains some of the fastest growing economies in the world. With smaller families, increasing household income and higher education, and expanding mid-to-high income classes have provided a huge opportunity for businesses around the world. These emerging markets nevertheless have different business dynamics and practices. Primarily the aim of the Asian Journal of Business Research is to provide a platform for researchers to share their findings on Asian business practices and issues with fellow researchers worldwide.

The emerging economies of some Asia countries remain stronger than most developed economies. China has recently overtaken Japan to become the world’s second largest economy. With an average GDP growth of 6-8% per annum, India is fast becoming another economic powerhouse. Other Asian countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam are being seen as business friendly. These countries have large population and a high saving rate. As most Asian governments become pro-business, large organisations begin to relocate to Asia, bringing with them knowledge, experience and understanding of consumer behaviour market research. These organizations soon develop distinct capabilities by refining and abstracting lessons from their day-to-day activities. They then standardize and document these lessons, which can form the basis of transferable business models that help them develop, source, make, and sell products  across a number of  geographic and product markets (Brown and Hagel, 2005).

For the inaugural issue of AJBR, we present seven selected papers. The first paper ‘Rankings in the eyes of the beholder: A vox populi approach to academic journal ranking’ examines the contentious issue of journal ranking. The study establishes a top 100 business journals ranking list which is statistically significant with the SCOPUS list. The second paper, based in Malaysia surveys 400 bank customers and explores inter-relationships among the dimensions of relationship marketing. The authors find strong evidence of the inter-relatedness of trust, commitment, communication and conflict handling. The third paper explores productivity of personal selling effort in FMCG sector considering two brands of two firms in India, while the fourth paper is based on a study conducted in Thailand for a university brand and shows that the brand personality dimensions of sincerity and competence have more influence on brand identification and word-of-mouth than the dimensions of excitement and sophistication.

The fifth paper integrates innovation characteristics of the Innovation-Diffusion Theory (IDT), perceived risk, trustworthiness, and permissibility constructs to investigate what determines user intention to adopt mobile marketing in the Malaysian markets. In the sixth paper, Yiming Tang and Milind Medhekar identify factors differentiating users and non-users of GPE (Green Power Electricity) in Australia while the seventh paper explores various dimensions of culture and marketing strategy using Hofstede’s culture dimensions, to establish a connection between cultural values and marketing strategy preferences. The researchers go on to show that managers from individualistic cultures tend to chose differentiation and niche marketing strategies over mass marketing strategies.

Finally with Asia soon becoming the growth engine of the world, the editorial team at AJBR encourages academic and industry-based researchers to contribute research papers and case studies for its peer-reviewed publication.