From social to transnational media management : challenges within and across national boundaries

Thanks to digitalization media products are much more suitable for a larger distribution than in the past, persuading media corporations to internationalize their activities. However, internationalization strategies for media companies present both opportunities and risks as managing conglomerations and the cultural distance of the countries involved implies a much higher complexity. In this thesis we approached this topic: we analysed the different strategies adopted by media corporations to cross borders, examining in particular the relevance of culture as well as the role of human resource management and knowledge transfer as critical factors for media firms towards the achievement of a competitive advantage. As media products and services are cultural goods and need to reflect local cultural needs, a pivotal question for transnational media corporations is how to find the appropriate coherence between their product and corporate strategy in order for them to fit with the corporate mission and vision of the firm.
Considering this frame, we thus identified four challenges that media firms need to deal with to reach a sustainable competitive advantage: (1) the social network challenge; (2) the internationalisation challenge; (3) the cultural challenge and (4) the knowledge transfer challenge. We examined each one of them in the four papers collected in this doctoral thesis. Our aim was to look for a potential answer to the following research question: how can media firms achieve a successful internationalisation strategy while being faithful to their mission and vision, and thus maintaining their original brand identity and image? Our finding might be considered as a contribution to fill the literature
in media management field.