Call for Papers | Journal of International Marketing | Artificial Intelligence in International Marketing: Mapping Impact Across the Domains of the Field

Special Issue Editors: Kay Peters, University of Hamburg, Germany (kay.peters@uni-hamburg.de) and Ayşegül Özsomer, Koç University, Türkiye (aozsomer@ku.edu.tr)

Proposal Deadline: August 21, 2026
Article Submission Deadline: December 15, 2026

The Journal of International Marketing (JIM) has historically led the field in identifying paradigm shifts before they became mainstream: publishing foundational work on born-global firms before internationalization theory had fully absorbed them, on emerging markets before “BRIC” became a boardroom term, and on cross-cultural branding before global brand management was a recognized discipline. Artificial intelligence in international marketing sits at a similar kind of inflection point: It is foundational enough to reshape the field, still undertheorized to warrant sustained scholarly attention, and managerially urgent to justify JIM’s practitioner-facing mission. Foundational constructs that anchor our field, cultural distance, standardization/adaptation, the liability of foreignness, country-of-origin effects, the Uppsala internationalization model, export performance, are being challenged simultaneously by a single technological shift. The role of a leading journal is to structure that research avenue and facilitate conversation (Özsomer 2026).

International marketing managers, export directors, global brand managers, and MNE strategy teams are making AI-related decisions right now, largely without the guidance of a systematic research base. Gartner (2025), for example, projects that by 2028, 90% of B2B buying will be intermediated by AI agents in one way or the other, channeling more than $15 trillion in spend through (semi-) automated agent-to-agent exchanges. Hence, the current practitioner stakes are immediate and substantial. This shift makes AI in export marketing and B2B channel management a strategic reality for the exporting SMEs and MNEs that are JIM’s stakeholders.

The current gap between the speedy evolution of AI and scholarly research is real and substantial, and is not limited to the export domain. At the same time, the window to claim this research avenue for JIM is narrowing. Since 2019, a review of contributions on AI across leading marketing and international business journals identifies roughly 65 papers, yet only a handful adopt an explicitly international marketing lens. Among them is recent work on generative AI guardrails for international business research, on privacy protection laws, national culture, AI innovation, on generative AI for video translation in international markets, and on multihoming as an internationalization strategy in a world of AI ecosystems (Delios et al. 2025; Wahid et al. 2026; Yoon et al. 2025; Zhou et al. 2025). International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM) has published early work on human–machine interaction in global contexts (Kopalle et al. 2022) and has two special issues on AI, one on generative AI and synthetic respondents (Erdem and Pauwels 2025) and a current call for papers on AI’s transformational role in marketing (Bart et al. 2026) that does not cover international marketing; Journal of International Business Studies has signaled growing interest in AI and international business. JIM acts now to set the intellectual framing of AI in international marketing and invites scholars to help shape the foundations of this new arena.

This special issue invites submissions that examine how artificial intelligence is reshaping theory, measurement, and practice in international marketing across its major topic domains. We organize the AI landscape into four broad paradigms and invite authors to situate their contribution within one or more of them:

Unsupervised and Self-Supervised Learning—Discovery:

Tools for generating new cross-cultural constructs, segmenting global consumers without prior theoretical imposition, and mapping the semantic structure of global brand meaning across languages and markets.

Supervised Learning (including LLMs)—Prediction at Scale:

Supervised and deep-learning approaches to large-scale international marketing problems — multilingual sentiment analysis, export performance prediction, cross-border consumer behavior modeling — with attention to measurement equivalence and construct validity across cultural contexts.

Reinforcement Learning—Dynamic Strategy:

Models of sequential international marketing decisions—market entry timing, pricing adaptation, brand investment allocation—as a new theoretical and empirical approach to strategy under uncertainty.

Agentic AI—Autonomous Workflows and Orchestration:

AI agents as autonomous actors in global markets that reshape consumer decision-making, B2B procurement, brand management, and MNE governance, raising the need for new theoretical frameworks for markets in which intelligence is no longer exclusively human.

For illustration: does Hofstede’s power distance dimension still moderate brand evaluation when a consumer delegates product selection to an AI shopping agent? Do country-of-origin effects migrate from the purchase decision to the agent-programming decision? Is the Uppsala model’s core mechanism, gradual learning through experiential knowledge accumulation, disrupted when AI agents can synthesize market intelligence at machine speed? Questions like these run through every domain of international marketing, and we invite conceptual papers that engage them.

For this special issue we issue a broad open call for short conceptual research papers on the intersections of topic domains in international marketing with one or more of the four AI paradigms (max. of 12,000 words). These domains are distilled from approx. 5,000 contributions on international marketing from 2010 to 2026 across 15 leading journals that cover international marketing (see list at the end). We welcome submissions addressing, but not limited to, the following research domains:

1. Consumer Behavior

• Cross-cultural consumer behavior
• Consumer acculturation and global culture
• Country-of-origin effects

2. Branding

• Global branding and brand equity
• International advertising and communication

3. International Strategy

• Internationalization, market entry and exit
• MNE strategy (e.g., standardization/adaptation), subsidiary management, and global governance
• Global talent, expatriates, and human capital
• Emerging markets: consumer, firm, and institutional perspectives
• Global value chains, offshoring, and supply chains
• International retailing and channel management

4. International B2B Marketing

• B2B sales, relationships, and buyer behavior across borders
• Export performance and marketing-mix strategy

5. Trade and Economics

• Trade policy, tariffs, and globalization dynamics
• Foreign direct investment and location choice
• Pricing, exchange rates, and international finance

6. Digital and Platforms

• Digital marketing, e-commerce, and platform globalization
• Social media, influencer marketing, and eWOM globally

7. Context and Society

• Institutional context, governance, and political risk
• Sustainability, CSR, climate, and global green marketing

Prospective authors are encouraged to make explicit which AI paradigm(s) and which domain(s) their submission engages, though we equally welcome cross-domain and cross-paradigm contributions that resist a single classification.

We explicitly encourage contributions that outline to what extent and how certain AI paradigms will affect a particular research domain, how it impacts and potentially alters scientifically identified mechanisms and findings (for academics and practitioners), and what a future research agenda looks like to address the anticipated changes.

Guidelines and Submission Information

We invite all interested authors and colleagues to attend a brainstorming and discussion session at this year’s Summer AMA in Denver on Sunday, July 26, 2026.

Anyone interested in contributing to the Special Issue needs to submit a 3-page proposal emailed to the special issue editors by August 20, 2026, containing the following information:

• Author(s), affiliations, and contacts
• International marketing research domain (see list above)
• AI paradigm (see list above)
• Major expected insights (750 words max.)

Please email your outline to both (guest) editors. We will inform you by August 30, 2026 with an initial feedback.

Manuscripts must not exceed 12,000 words and must be submitted by December 15, 2026. These will be reviewed as a cohort for this special issue. Submissions will undergo JIM’s standard double-anonymized review process. Manuscripts must be submitted via the journal’s ScholarOne site (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ama_jim), following the standard JIM author guidelines. Please mention the Special Issue in your submission. Questions about the special issue may be directed to the guest editors; please include both guest editors in all correspondence.

Key Dates

• Special issue session, 2026 AMA Summer Conference, Denver: July 26, 2026, 8-9:15 a.m. and 9:30-10:45 a.m.
• Submission of proposal: August 21, 2026
• Initial review/feedback on proposal: August 30, 2026
• Manuscript submission deadline: December 15, 2026
• Notification of first editorial decision: January 15, 2027
• Revision deadline: February 28, 2027
• Expected online publication: March/April 2027

We look forward to your contributions to this special issue and to establishing the Journal of International Marketing as the authoritative home for research on artificial intelligence in international marketing.

References

Delios, A., et al. (2025), “How to Intelligently Embrace Generative AI: The First Guardrails for the Use of GenAI in IB Research,” Journal of International Business Studies, 56, 451-460.

Gartner (2025), “Gartner Unveils Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users in 2026 and Beyond,” Gartner Newsroom, October 21, 2025.

Kopalle, P. K., et al. (2022), “ Examining artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in marketing via a global lens: Current trends and future research opportunities,” International Journal of Research in Marketing, 39, 522-540.

Lewin, A. Y. (2025), “Looking Ahead for Developments That Could Affect the Field of International Business,” Journal of International Business Studies, 56, 557-558.

Özsomer, A. (2026), “What Is International Marketing? A Look at the Present, the Future, and New Initiatives in JIM,” Journal of International Marketing, 34(1), 1-4.

Wahid, N., et al. (2026), “Generative AI for Video Translation: Consumer Evaluation in International Markets,” Journal of International Marketing, 34(1), 27-33.

Yoon, S., et al. (2025), “Privacy Protection Laws, National Culture, and Artificial Intelligence Innovation Around the World,” Journal of International Business Studies, 56, 853-873.

Zhou, C., et al. (2025), “Multihoming: An Internationalization Strategy in a World of Artificial Intelligence Ecosystems,” Journal of International Business Studies, 56, 1188-1196.

List of Journals Covering International Marketing Topics:

1. Journal of International Marketing
2. Journal of International Business Studies
3. International Marketing Review
4. Journal of Global Marketing
5. Journal International Economics
6. Journal of Marketing
7. Journal of Marketing Research
8. Marketing Science
9. Management Science
10. International Journal of Research in Marketing
11. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
12. Journal of Business Research
13. Journal of Retailing
14. Marketing Letters
15. Industrial Marketing Management