Professor Anne Souchon is Chair of International Marketing at 色狗导航 Business School, 色狗导航, and a qualified Adult Mental Health First Aider. She was Associate Dean for Enterprise between 2017 and 2022.
Anne’s research focus is on maximising organisational performance (customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, sales and profit growth, Net Promoter Score) through agile decision-making. She founded the Global Improvisation Dynamics Consortium in 2013, a cross-university research centre which now includes members from around the world, studying exporting organisations’ decision-making styles, focussing on the interaction of improvisation and planning. The Consortium uses mixed methods (e.g. content analysis, psychometric measurement theory, confirmatory factor analysis, and structural equation modelling) to study how company performance increases when distinct decision-making processes (e.g., planning norms and improvisation) interact. Their work has featured in the Journal of International Marketing (JIM), Journal of Business Research (JBR), Industrial Marketing Management (IMM), International Marketing Review (IMR), among others.
Anne’s publications have won numerous international awards, and she has been the recipient of several British Academy financial research grants. She is a 2025 recipient of the Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Building the Bridge research award for her work on the Net Promoter Score. In 2026, she was awarded an Outstanding Reviewer of the Year award by the International Business Review board. She sits on the editorial board of the Industrial Marketing Management and now also on the board of the International Business Review.
Research Stream 1: Export Marketing Strategy, Decision-Making and Performance
Anne operates in two inter-related research streams. Her first and most enduring field of interest and expertise focusses on organisational and export-specific decision-making, the impact of different decision-making processes (planning and improvisation) on performance and performance measurement (e.g., Net Promoter Score).
Across her work, the recurring claim is that export and marketing performance depends less on how much information a firm collects than on how it processes, interprets, and uses it. Her studies demonstrate that information matters when it is embedded in routines, linked to organisational responsiveness, and translated into action, often through customer satisfaction rather than a direct performance effect.
A second through-line is that export decision-making works best as a blend of planning and improvisation, not as a choice between them. Her studies show coexistence of the two logics, but the performance payoff is conditional: planning can support some outcomes while hurting others, improvisation tends to help responsiveness, but its components do not behave uniformly.
In turn, export improvisation is presented as something firms can foster through commitment, learning orientation, and inter-functional coordination, while information generation may dampen the more spontaneous forms of decision-making.
Her most recent work on “chutzpah” and market-driving orientation of firms extends the same broader argument into strategic posture: advantage comes from bounded audacity, not from raw rule-breaking or a purely reactive market orientation. For example, while audacity increases responsiveness, norm violation does the opposite.
This sits neatly beside her market-driving and market-driven export-orientation work, which treats stronger customer orientation as only one route to advantage and leaves room for firms that try to shape, not just follow, markets.
Her NPS review fits the same sceptical, measurement-aware tradition: it argues that NPS is widely used but rests on a shaky empiricism and an underdeveloped nomological net, so the field’s broader message is not “pick one simple KPI” but “ask what the metric actually captures and how it connects to action.”
Read together, her body of work showcases a program of research that moves from measuring export information use, to explaining how decision-makers turn information into action, to showing that the best-performing firms often combine structure with improvisation, and finally to warning that popular managerial metrics and slogans can oversimplify a much messier causal chain.
She has been awarded a total of nine research grants to investigate these issues, and her publications have appeared in the Journal of International Marketing, Industrial Marketing Management, International Marketing Review, European Journal of Marketing, European Management Review, to name a few.
Research Stream 2: Advertising, Sponsorship and Marketing Communications
She is also active in the area of advertising and sponsorship, particular in the context of sport. Her papers in this field fit together as one argument about socially risky marketing: attention-grabbing tactics only work when the audience reads them as purposeful, legible, and strategically coherent rather than merely transgressive.
One core claim is that Chutzpadik advertising is not a single thing; it has distinct dimensions, and the paper’s four studies show that norm violation, novelty, and audacity do not contribute to effectiveness in the same way.
Her sponsorship papers make the same kind of point from the other side of the relationship. They shift attention away from the sponsor alone and toward the social structure around the sponsorship, especially concurrent sponsors, perceived authority, and the sense that the sponsors form a real group.
That “groupness” matters because it shapes collective responsibility judgments, which then feed into sponsee equity; in other words, sponsor arrangements affect the target property not just through fit or exposure, but through how responsibility is assigned.
Taken together, this body of work shows that provocative marketing communication can generate value, but only when it is disciplined by social meaning.
Audacity in advertising can increase responsiveness and salience, but pure norm violation risks backlash; likewise, sponsorship can build sponsee equity when the sponsor constellation feels authoritative and coherent, but not when responsibility cues run the wrong way.
This is less a celebration of shock than a theory of bounded transgression: marketing works when it bends expectations without breaking legitimacy.
This work has been published in the Journal of Advertising, European Sport Management Quarterly and the Journal of Business Research.
Souchon, A.L., Oliveira, J.S., Hodgkinson, I., Nemkova, E., Hughes, P., Boso, N., and Hultman, H. (2026) “Drivers of export improvisation: empirical evidence from UK export manufacturers”, International Marketing Review, 43: 1-37 [ABS3, impact factor 5.50, SNIP 1.567, SJR 1.202].
Efrat, K., Souchon, A.L., and Asseraf, Y. (2026) “Spicing up international strategy with Chutzpah – the context of market-driving and market-driven export orientations”, International Marketing Review, 43(1): 57-76 [ABS3, impact factor 5.50, SNIP 1.567, SJR 1.202].
Lacohee, H., Souchon, A.L., Dickenson, P., Krug, L., Saffre, F. (2024) “The Net Promoter Score paradox: Review and research agenda for service firms”, International Journal of Market Research, 66(2-3): 241-260 [ABS2, impact factor 4.513, SNIP 0.970, SJR 0.568].
Oliveira, J., Hultman, M., Boso, N., Hodgkinson, I., Hughes, P., Nemkova, E., and Souchon, A.L. (2023) “Decision-making in international marketing: Past, present, and future”, International Marketing Review, 40(3), 413-428 [ABS3, impact factor 5.50, SNIP 1.567, SJR 1.202].
Hultman, M., Boso, N., Yeboah-Banin, A., Hodgkinson, I., Souchon, A.L., Nemkova, E., Oliveira, J., and Hughes, P. (2022) “How agency and self-efficacy moderate the effects of strategic improvisational behaviors on sales performance: Evidence from an emerging market”, European Management Review, 19(3), 417-435 [ABS3, impact factor 2.94, SNIP 1.148, SJR 0.784].
Efrat K., Souchon A.L., Hughes, P., Wald, A., and Cai, J. (2022) “Mitigating coopetition tensions: The forgotten formation stage”, European Management Review, 1-22 [ABS3, impact factor 2.94, SNIP 1.148, SJR 0.784].
Efrat, K., Souchon, A.L., Dickenson, P., and Nemkova, E. (2021) “Chutzpadik advertising and its effectiveness: Four studies of agencies and audiences”, Journal of Business Research, 137, 601-613 [ABS3, impact factor 7.55, SNIP 3.09, SJR 2.316].
Dickenson, P. and Souchon, A. L. (2020) “Sponsees matter! How collective responsibility judgments of sport sponsors affect sponsee equity”, European Sport Management Quarterly, 20(5), 537-559. [ABS3, impact factor 3.71, SNIP 1.11, SJR 1.280].
Markovich, A., Efrat, K., Raban, D.R. and Souchon, A.L. (2019) “Competitive intelligence embeddedness: Drivers and performance consequences”, European Management Journal, 37(6), 708-718 [ABS2, impact factor 5.08, SNIP 2.08, SJR 1.477].
Hughes, P., Souchon, A.L., Nemkova, E., Hodgkinson, I., Oliveira, J., Boso,, N, Hultman, M., and Sy-Changco, J. (2019) “Quadratic effects of export decision-making on innovation orientation: Evidence from Chinese exporting firms”, Industrial Marketing Management, 83, 59-69 [ABS3, impact factor 8.24, SNIP 2.18. SJR 2.022].
Dickenson, P., and Souchon, A.L. (2018) “Entitativity of concurrent sponsors: Implications for properties and sponsors”, Journal of Advertising, 1-23 [ABS3, impact factor 6.30, SNIP 2.86, SJR 3.092].
Efrat, K., Hughes, P., Nemkova, E. Souchon, A.L., and Sy-Changco, J. (2018) “Leveraging of dynamic export capabilities for competitive advantage and performance consequences: Evidence from China”, Journal of Business Research, 84, 114-134 [ABS3, impact factor 7.55, SNIP 3.09, SJR 2.316].
Souchon, A.L., Hughes, P., Farrell, A.M., Nemkova, E., and Oliveira, J. (2017) “Spontaneity and international marketing performance”, International Marketing Review, 33(5), 671-690 [ABS3, impact factor 5.50, SNIP 1.567, SJR 1.202].
Banin, A.Y, Boso, N., Hultman, M., Souchon, A.L., Hughes, P., and Nemkova, E. (2016) “Salesperson improvisation: Antecedents, performance outcomes, and boundary conditions”, Industrial Marketing Management, 59(November), 120-130 [ABS3, impact factor 8.24, SNIP 2.18. SJR 2.022].
Nemkova, E., Souchon, A. L., Hughes, P., and Micevski, M. (2015) “Does improvisation help or hinder planning in determining export success? Decision theory applied to exporting”, Journal of International Marketing, 23(3), 41-65 [ABS3, impact factor 4.98, SNIP 2.41, SJR 2.034].
Most recently, Anne was a recipient of the Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) research grant and award on Building the Bridge between Theory and Practice for work on NPS (2025), has won numerous conference and journal Best Paper awards, and Science Direct “Top 25 Hottest Articles”, and was awarded Most Outstanding Reviewer awards by the International Business Review (2026) and International Journal of Wine Marketing (2022).
Anne currently sits on the Editorial Review Boards of Industrial Marketing Management and International Business Review. She also reviews on an ad-hoc basis for a number of other journals.