Innovative companies after the first and second waves of the COVID-19 pandemic are undergoing significant changes: from new trends in the markets to the growth of remote work in the digital environment. At any stage of development, innovative companies need an adaptive marketing approach to the implementation of the planned strategy. Marketing solutions to the problems of a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment (VUCA) in 2023 can rightfully be considered an emergency aid to innovative transformations in emerging markets. The triad “market orientation – innovation – performance” chain has been extended to various innovation types– from technological and product innovation to innovation orientation and capability. Moreover, the market orientation research agenda has, during last 10 years, highlighted customer orientation as a key component of market orientation that drives innovative activities.

Today, the ability to engage customers is a key factor of brand competitiveness in global markets. Not surprising, marketers are scrambling to figure how to utilize social media and other digital platforms to motivate customer engagement (CE), defined as brand-focused behavioral manifestations, other than purchases, resulting from individual and group motivational drivers. In this study we adopt consumer investment in trademarks perspective, suggesting that consumers proactively use global brand’s signs to express themselves, affirm values, communicate, and experience pleasure in digital platforms. The brand owners deploy trademarks to protect the symbols, which can distinguish the goods or services of a brand owner from those of other enterprises. We hypothesize that by registering trademarked signs in the host markets, global brands may facilitate CE and achieve superior performance. We empirically test these proposition using data for 125 global brands and trademark finings these brands in the twenty largest economies. The results of model confirm expectations that both trademarking in the host markets and consistency in using protected signs positively affected brand’s market share. The study provides managerial, theoretical, and policy insights in context of global brand protection.

Specifics of emerging markets raise some questions on the applicability of wellestablished marketing concepts and scales, widely used in the developed markets, in the context of emerging markets. Over the past twenty years emerging markets have remained one of the main focus of marketing research. The interest of the researchers to the emerging markets is not accidental, it is caused by the peculiarities of the developing markets. Specific features of the emerging markets challenge the use of approaches designed for developed markets in emerging markets. Existing research describes peculiarities of emerging markets and shows the evidence of inability to use the theories designed in the developed markets in emerging markets (Burgess, Steenkamp, 2006; Sheth, 2011). The external environment and the increasing competition force companies to rethink their marketing activities and seek new sources of competitive advantages, and one of the primary tasks for the company is the development of customer orientation (Jacob, 2006; Ellis, 2006; Frambach, Fiss, Ingenbleek, 2016). Customer orientation (CO), as one of the key concepts of contemporary marketing, requires rethinking in the context of emerging markets (Sheth, 2011; Roersen, Kraaijenbrink, Groen, 2013; Smirnova, Rebiazina, Frosen, 2018). The purpose of this paper is to develop a tool for a complex evaluation of the company’s CO adapted to the specifics of the Russian emerging market. The empirical study includes mixed qualitative-quantitative design: at the first stage a quantitative survey with representatives of 239 companies operating in the Russian market, and at the second - 62 in-depth interviews were conducted to test the CO scale’s applicability to the Russian market.

We propose a conceptual model of MO in emerging markets by drawing on industrial organization and economic sociology, and outline factors which can better explain the determinant-strategy-performance relationships in emerging markets. We provide two country examples (Russia and China), and propose future research directions for our conceptual model.

The concept of customer orientation (CO) has been studied for quite a long time at first as a major part of market orientation and then as a separate construct. For emerging market the role of CO became paramount with the shift from the planned to the market economy. However, after more than two decades of transition Russian companies are still demonstrating rather a claim of being customer orientation, instead of implementing a long-term orientation towards customer. This paper focuses on reconsidering applying the Narver and Slater (1990) approach to conceptualizing and measuring customer orientation, and its empirical test and validation in the context of Russian economy. This study is based on data from two empirical studies on Russian companies, conducted during the pre-crisis (2008) and post-crisis (2010) period. Our results reveal that existing theory on customer orientation is not fully confirmed by the evidence from Russian companies.

Emerging markets represent a significant part of the world economy and tend to expand their share, but they are still not well examined. Specifically, one of the BRIC economies, Russia seems to be avoided in the overall marketing strategy academic discussion. According to Sheth (2011, p. 7) market orientation and relationship marketing are marketing strategies that have become mainstream for empirical research in marketing. But existing research shows that these marketing strategies have hardly been investigated in–depth in Russian context for the last twenty years. The purpose of this paper is to test Contemporary Marketing Practices model in Russian market. Classification scheme of marketing practices is based on “Contemporary marketing practices – CMP” methodology: TM (Transactional marketing, DM (Database marketing), IM (Interactive marketing), NM (Network marketing) and RM (Relationship marketing) (Coviello et al, 2002). Thus, main research question is to reveal what types of marketing practices (transactional, data based, interactive, relational or network) are more often used by Russian companies. Paper is based on empirical data (quantitative study of 329 Russian companies). Cluster analysis was conducted to show that types of marketing practices are common for Russian market: transactional, relational or interactive.