Article Preview
Top1. Introduction
Small and medium enterprises are the backbone of national economies and simultaneously they are more and more involved in the international expansion. Thus, we need to better understand their internationalization. The imperative to investigate their international expansion is related to the emergence of new factors that have visible impact on operations of firms and often facilitate their internationalization. The pool of these factors embraces the access and exploitation of new communication technologies, efficient transportation solutions and the omnipresence of Internet (Acs & Preston, 1997; Knight, 2001; Lu & Beamish, 2001). Internet and other computer-based information system (CBIS) technologies are accelerators of firm internationalization (e.g. Ekeledo & Sivakumar, 2004; Petersen, Lawrence & Liesch, 2002) since they allow to easier acquire information on foreign markets (Mathews & Healy, 2007), reduce costs arising from the spatial distance and diminish travel costs (Arenius, Sasi & Gabrielsson, 2006). The significance of these factors for international expansion is high for each company, but the highest for SMEs that usually are recognized as entities that suffer from the liability of smallness. But thanks to the Internet and new communication solutions, size itself is not an issue for some SMEs (Wolff & Pett, 2000), and they are even born global companies or follow the path of accelerated internationalization (Oviatt & McDougall, 1994; Autio, 2005; Zahra, 2005). Nowadays communication between individual entities is being ‘done’ more and more via the Internet (Walther, 1996; Di Blasio & Milani, 2008; Okdie & Guadagno, 2008). Companies also use new solutions in order to initiate and maintain contact with other market participants (Valos, Habibi, Casidy, Driesener & Maplestone, 2016). New theoretical approaches, e.g. Marketing 3.0 and 4.0, social marketing or marketing 360, appear for which the stimulus are new technological solutions (Finne & Grönroos, 2017; Kotler, Kartajaya & Setiawan, 2017). As a result, new forms and channels of both individual and marketing communication (e.g. advertising on social media) continue to be created. However, successful international growth is still a challenge for many of SMEs and the use of new communication solutions could be a remedy against the lack of knowledge on foreign markets and particular capabilities.
The way companies employ new technologies and new Internet instruments (e.g. social media) in their activities in the international market depends on many factors (Smith & Zook, 2016). Sometimes these factors stem from the accepted strategy of a given company and the necessity to adjust, as well as cooperation between IT and marketing departments. In other situations, the nature of media and their technological advancement are conditioned by the peculiarity of a foreign market or is about to enter (e.g. Hsu, Tien, Lin & Chang, 2015).
The environment – i.e. the conditions prevailing in a particular foreign market – as a variable influencing the use of Internet and social media, is a well-researched field (e.g. Erkan & Evans, 2016; Davies, Musango & Brent, 2016).