Mission Accomplished?
Unlike good old W, it took me some time to come to this headline. And I am still not sure whether this one is really final. Therefore the question-mark. The last year was incredibly busy. I was working on three major studies. One of them was just resubmitted to the Journal of Marketing Research. While we appreciated the many feedback we received for the article, we had to invest some significant time and effort to address all raised concerns. Nevertheless, we are sure that it was worth. The paper significantly benefited from the workaround. Whereas we changed a lot in terms of model and measurement, the study still focuses on the impact of country specific factors on the country’s marketing sensitivities. Thanks to a crawler we coded during my time in Kiel, we obtained data from one of the most global markets these days: the Apple App Store. Analyzing thousands of apps and having hundreds of thousands of observation from 60 countries we analyze how cultural variables (like e.g. individualism, masculinity or power distance) affect price and rating elasticities.
Our findings deliver valuable insights for marketers. Although that people claim the world to be a global village, the village citizens are still pretty different. This implies that marketing managers do well in adapting marketing campaigns to the local circumstances. Thereby our results do provide great help. We did not only investigate price, rating and product complexity elasticities for 60 countries, we also help to predict sensitivities and elasticities for countries out of our scope. The map below is already a great starting point, highlighting patterns in price sensitivities around the globe.
I guess my three co-authors Koen Pauwels, Gökhan Yildirim and Thomas Fandrich are as happy as me. However, for me this is a special moment. 10 years ago being a freshman in Kiel’s master program, I was working on my very first academic paper (Seminararbeit). The title: Localize or Globailze: International Marketing Strategies. To be honest, the paper was a disaster and only my big mouth helped me out at the very end during my orals. So I took the words of the adivising professor (guess his name;)) seriously and had another look at the topic. And as they say, better late than never, it only took me 10 years to present a better version 
I am especially glad that Koen also features the study in his blog. Why not have a look?