Family businesses are a dominant organisational form worldwide and play a critical role in shaping employment, investment and long-term regional development. They are also key participants in cross-border activity. Recent studies show that internationalisation by family-controlled businesses is pervasive enough to affect aggregate patterns of global competition, rather than being a marginal exception. Existing research has paid great attention to examining whether and to what extent family involvement alters the degree, speed, and performance of internationalisation. In contrast, the marketing dimension of family businesses' international activity, in terms of how the family imprint travels to foreign customers and channels, remains comparatively underdeveloped in the literature.

International marketing can be the arena where family-specific goals, resources, and constraints can directly shape how the firm presents its brand, selects channels, and serves customers abroad. Family socioemotional wealth concerns around control, reputation, social ties, and harmony through generations shape how firms frame and deliver value abroad. These concerns are salient in international settings that often entail shared control, external scrutiny and new governance demands. As a result, family businesses frequently favour incremental, low-commitment paths that rely on trusted networks before undertaking international investments, with implications for market selection, positioning and channel configuration. Also, when they do commit, families prefer to screen partners and locations for reputational fit and legal quality, and are willing to pay premia to secure brand safety. Stewardship norms further influence employment and CSR communications across borders, shaping how businesses cultivate legitimacy with foreign stakeholders. At the same time, family businesses navigating new markets face a liability of outsidership; effective signalling can help convert domestic reputation into host-market acceptance.

Building on these insights and the emerging call to study family multinationals from an international marketing vantage point, this special issue invites research that places international marketing at the centre of the conversation on family-business internationalisation by connecting socioemotional wealth-driven choices, institutional contexts and customer-facing outcomes in foreign markets.

Research on family business branding shows that communicating the family nature of the business can generate perceptions of authenticity and trust, enhancing purchase intentions and customer loyalty. Consumers often infer that family business brands are more honest, responsible, and long-term oriented than non-family rivals, especially when the family narrative is integrated into the brand identity and communication. At the same time, scholarly work warns that mere family ownership is insufficient, and the performance effects of family involvement depend heavily on whether and how firms adopt explicit family-based branding strategies, including in international markets.

Family businesses' distinct goals and time horizons further differentiate their marketing strategies. Building on behavioural agency theory, family owners place particular weight on family control, identity, and legacy, which shape risk preferences in ways that spill over into marketing. In an international marketing context, this can lead family businesses to prioritize reputation preservation, relational stability, and intergenerational trust over short-term sales maximization, resulting in more patient investments in customer relationships, cautious product diversification, or conservative communication styles. Such strategic orientation can provide resilience by maintaining or deepening customer-facing activities during downturns to protect the firm's legacy and stakeholder ties, but it may also make them slower to adjust their marketing strategies in rapidly changing foreign markets.

Resource endowments and governance structures also shape family businesses' marketing behaviour. Smaller and mid-sized family businesses often rely on lean management teams and informal decision-making, which can foster agility and close customer contact but may limit the adoption of advanced marketing analytics, professional brand management, or sophisticated digital tools. However, when family businesses successfully combine their relational strengths and local legitimacy with a strong market orientation and knowledge management capabilities, they can match or outperform non-family competitors.

Internationally active family businesses should decide how prominently to signal their familiness in foreign markets, how to adapt their brand stories to unfamiliar cultural contexts, and how to leverage family and diaspora networks for market development. Recent work on family business branding and consumer behaviour shows that perceptions of family business brands, including trust and social responsibility, are contextually contingent and may vary across countries and cultures. At the same time, internationalisation research reveals that family businesses can follow distinctive internationalisation paths, as sometimes more cautious and stepwise, sometimes surprisingly aggressive, depending on how families balance socioemotional wealth preservation and growth aspirations. Yet, we still lack fine-grained empirical analyses of how these strategic trade-offs appear in concrete international marketing decisions and integrative frameworks that explain when and why family influence leads to particular marketing configurations and with what consequences for international competitiveness and societal outcomes.

Theoretically, there is considerable scope to bring together concepts from family business with core constructs in international marketing such as global brand architecture, standardization-adaptation strategies, international market orientation, and cross-cultural consumer response. Socioemotional wealth motives may influence whether family businesses choose to foreground or downplay their family identity in different markets, yet we have limited theory on how this choice interacts with country-level culture or category norms to shape brand authenticity and trust. Likewise, family business scandals and crises suggest that the same family-based brand that generates goodwill can become a liability when reputational shocks occur, but we lack in-depth research on how families manage such risks in international settings.

Empirically, there is a pressing need for rigorous, multi-method, and time-lagged cross-national studies that unpack how family involvement shapes international marketing decisions and performance. Existing work shows that family business brands can enjoy a trust premium among consumers and that the communication of family involvement can be strategically calibrated across channels and audiences. Yet, robust empirical evidence linking specific international marketing configurations to market-based outcomes remains scarce. Rich empirical work and case-study research can complement these efforts by illuminating the micro-processes through which families debate, negotiate, and implement marketing strategies, including intergenerational tensions and the role of non-family managers.

There is also a strong case for implication-driven research with clear managerial and policy relevance. Family business owners and leaders should decide, often with limited guidance, how to position their businesses in global markets. Evidence-based answers to questions about brand positioning, professionalisation of marketing capabilities, and management of social media and corporate social responsibility communication are valuable both for practitioners and policymakers, and support organizations designing programs for internationally oriented family small and medium enterprises.

This special issue seeks empirical papers that rigorously examine international and cross-cultural contexts. We welcome quantitative studies including large-scale surveys, experiments, archival and panel data, and qualitative and process studies including case studies, ethnographies, and historical analyses that develop new theoretical perspectives. Contributions should clearly articulate how family-specific characteristics shape international marketing phenomena and also should provide actionable implications for family business leaders and policymakers.

Potential topics

• Branding and identity strategies of international family businesses
• Consumer perceptions and behaviour toward family vs. non-family businesses across cultures
• International market orientation, innovation, and digital marketing in family businesses
• Reputation management and communication in family multinationals
• International operational mode choices, channels, and international marketing configuration in family businesses
• Governance, professionalisation, and the role of non-family managers and boards in shaping international marketing of family business
• Cultural, institutional, and regional contingencies in family business international marketing effectiveness
• Global crisis, scandals, and responses in family-branded international marketing operation
• Methodological advancement for studying international marketing in family businesses

Timeline

• January 3, 2027: Opening date for manuscripts submissions
• September 30, 2027: Closing date for manuscripts submission