How to successfully manage the early internationalisation process of a digital marketing agency

Abstract

Digital Marketing is one of the biggest business trends today, with this market experiencing consecutive growth over the last years. Its attractiveness acts as a trigger for the emergence of Born Global firms, which focus on selling online advertising services. Such firms target several foreign markets from inception. This challenges traditional internationalisation theories, like the Uppsala model, in which international expansion is seen as more of an incremental process. The aim of this dissertation is to understand how digital marketing agencies can follow a successful and sustainable internationalisation process. The final output is to combine guidelines that can be seen as a structure to follow regarding internationalisation. It focuses on the start of foreign expansion activities, by building a framework that describes how online advertising agencies should expand given the characteristics of their business. To accomplish this, a case-study research approach was employed, in which key informants in leading Digital Marketing agencies in the Portuguese market were interviewed. To support the given recommendations, financial data regarding the foreign operations of one of them was analysed. Findings indicate that Portuguese digital marketing agencies should follow a hybrid internationalisation model, with characteristics from both traditional school of thought (Uppsala Model) and the most recent theories (Born Global and the importance of networks). Agencies at the beginning of their internationalisation process should start by carefully selecting and evaluating their networking potential, in order to find the best partners to work with in each country. However, they should also carry out extensive strategic analysis to assess their cultural, administrative, geographical, economical and digital distance to the different countries they could potentially target. Market knowledge and the commitment of resources must be carefully managed in order to reduce uncertainty and, therefore, risk. The entry modes in the different markets must be characterised by the moderate level of control, low resource commitment and the establishment of sales force in the foreign market, so that the firm can achieve sustainability and keep entering new markets.

Date of Award	6 Jul 2015
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Ana Isabel de Almeida Costa (Supervisor) & Fernando Santos Jorge (Co-Supervisor)