Understanding how brands compete across borders has become a core concern for companies operating in markets where economic, institutional, and cultural differences between countries shape consumer behaviour in ways that standard marketing theory often fails to account for.

Jan-Benedict Steenkamp, C. Knox Massey Distinguished Professor of Marketing at the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School, has spent more than 30 years researching global brands, cross-country marketing differences and the measurement challenges that arise when comparing consumer behaviour across markets. His work, which has received more than 75,000 citations, spans six books and over 150 scholarly publications. He is co-founder and executive chairman of AiMark, a research centre involving Fortune 500 companies that studies drivers of brand growth.

UNSW Business School's Professor Karin Sanders spoke with Prof. Steenkamp about how global brands create value, why the country dimension matters for marketing strategy, what drives the effectiveness of marketing actions, and why business school research that fails to serve practice is not fulfilling its purpose.

Prof. Sanders: Can you explain the core of your work?

Prof. Steenkamp: I am interested in the management and the equity of global brands – how they create value for companies, why consumers have a preference for them, and the dangers, competitive and also political, that global brands run into. The world, as we all know, is ever-changing, which means managers face an ever-changing challenge in managing these global brands.

Learn more: Marketing in the AI agentic enterprise: Lessons from Salesforce

Prof. Sanders: There is also an international component – the differences between countries?

Prof. Steenkamp: Yes. I have been interested in the differences between countries for a long time. Marketing theories typically abstract from the country dimension, meaning they do not take into account the different economic, institutional, and cultural backgrounds of countries. That is scientifically and managerially unsatisfying, unless we show there are no differences between countries.

I am interested in why there are these differences between countries and how we can better explain them. It started when I got the chair in international marketing at Wageningen University. If you come from a smaller country (I come from the Netherlands), it is natural to think internationally, because the international world is much bigger than the national one. What I am interested in is quantifying these differences: not just talking about them, but putting numbers on them.

Prof. Sanders: What aspects of these country differences interest you most? Economic differences, cultural values, or something else?

Prof. Steenkamp: As an economist by training, my natural point of departure is to look at economic differences between countries. Think about something as simple as GDP per capita. At the moment, if you compare Australia versus Papua New Guinea, you already see these differences. However, over time, I have also become interested in cultural differences, particularly those involving different cultural frameworks. I am particularly interested in Inglehart's framework, because it is dynamic and rooted in modernisation theory. However, I have found Hofstede's work (which has been widely criticised) has remained informative.

Subscribe to BusinessThink for the latest research, analysis and insights from UNSW Business School

Prof. Sanders: What are the most important research questions in your work?

Prof. Steenkamp: A couple of areas. One is methodological. If we collect survey self-report data from respondents in different countries, how do we make those responses comparable within and across countries, and how do we remove biases from this kind of data? That whole stream of work was actually triggered by questions from one of the largest fast-moving consumer goods companies in the world.

But the substantive question I am most interested in is everything about branding – brand equity, branding within and across countries, and the effectiveness of marketing actions to increase brand sales. Think about marketing elasticities: understanding how responsive consumers in different markets are to changes in price, advertising and other marketing levers. If those elasticities vary by country – and they do, then the implications for how companies allocate marketing budgets across markets are significant.

Bridging research and practice

Prof. Sanders: You travel between academia and practice with ease. How did you achieve that, given that many people find it a difficult journey?

Prof. Steenkamp: For me, this was non-negotiable. My supervisor, when I was doing my dissertation, did not believe in anything but real data, which meant I needed to get sponsorship to obtain it. In those days, not all these data sets were available. My doctoral dissertation was sponsored by the Dutch Commodity Board for Livestock and Meat. I am pretty sure that the people who sponsored it saw very little relationship between the reports and presentations I gave to them and my doctoral dissertation. But I was forced from the beginning to engage with practice.

Learn more: Understanding customer decision-making: The Amazon challenge

I studied at an agricultural university in the Netherlands, which is part of the group of technical universities. They have a long history of close interaction with companies because those fields are applied. Engineering is an applied field. Agriculture is an applied field. Coming from that background, applying was not seen as something negative. It was seen as: if you do not have anything to say to marketing practice, you are failing. From there, I continued along those lines, meaning that most of my research has been externally funded and has used external data. Wageningen was (and probably still is) among Dutch universities the one that collects the most money from external sources.

Prof. Sanders: So your connection between research and practice was shaped by the university culture and your supervisor?

Prof. Steenkamp: Yes, but there was also something else. I do believe that marketing is an applied science, and a business school is a professional school. It is not a school like arts and sciences. And because it is a professional school, business professors get (at least in the US) higher salaries than people at other places. They get a better deal.

But as my mother taught her three sons, you cannot take without giving something back. If we have the benefits of being a business professor, such as salaries and working conditions, we must give something back. People who feel ashamed to be at a business school and would prefer to be in psychology, economics or sociology – the pure sciences – I have no patience with that opinion. If you want to be there, go to that place; that is fine. But do not get the benefits without also paying your dues.

Learn more: The theory and practice of getting consumers to change behaviour

On perseverance

Prof. Sanders: What is your advice for people who struggle with setbacks in their careers?

Prof. Steenkamp: Setbacks are never nice. I have been around for some time, and I still find them hard to take. So it is normal. But the point is, when something is normal, that does not mean you have to let it go.

What you need is intrinsic motivation and perseverance. A third aspect, related to both, is to gradually expand the scope of what you are interested in and tackle new questions. I believe we get a lot of burnout because people have been doing the same thing over and over again. Some people get excited about working in the same area for a long time; that is great. But for many people, just like if you eat a steak every day, after a week or two, you will get bored. People may want to branch out, expand the scope and enter new areas. It requires perseverance, but when you look at people who have sustained influence over a long career, they all had perseverance and intrinsic motivation, and they gradually moved from one area to the next as something interesting came up.

Prof. Sanders: Can we add energy to that? These are all people who have a lot of energy and passion.

Prof. Steenkamp: The passion is definitely linked to intrinsic motivation. I do believe that energy and intrinsic motivation are related, but they are still a little different. Some people have intrinsic motivation but are very low in energy. They will be slow, but that still means they can deliver – though their output will never match that of someone with both motivation and energy.

Learn more: Secrets of the most successful social media marketing campaigns

On recognition and perspective

Prof. Sanders: You are one of the most cited scholars in your field. What are the positive and negative sides of that recognition?

Prof. Steenkamp: The positive side is that if you do your best and try for the best, it is nice to have some level of success. For many people, how they see themselves is certainly not unrelated to professional success.

The negative side is that you get many more "friends" (in quotation marks). My best friends tend to be people I have known for a long time, people who knew me from earlier times. As the son of a politician, I know that much popularity is transactional.  And we should regard fame in marketing in its proper perspective. To be well known in marketing is not exactly the same as being the Prime Minister of Australia (although you have had quite some turnover in that role) or having had an impact on world history as Prime Minister Thatcher did. So the recognition is nice, of course, and to say otherwise would not be believable. But you have to keep it in perspective.