This study examines digital marketing’s role in cross – border e – commerce brand internationalization. Using a macroscopic approach, we developed a coupled model to assess brand internationalization status under digital marketing’s push. The model factors in digital marketing transaction scale, international brand registration numbers, and international market complexities. In the empirical phase, we crafted a double – difference estimation model. Here, the natural logarithm of Chinese overseas brands’ influence in destination – country industries is the dependent variable, while the explanatory variable is the interaction between the dummy variable for digital marketing policy implementation timing and the national industry processing cluster identification variable. We also included multiple control variables to enhance result accuracy. Acknowledging the difficulty in obtaining true values for predicting brand internationalization effects, we proposed an innovative two – step quantile regression method. This offers a solution and provides reliable technical support for our research. We used panel data from 1573 cross – border e – commerce digital marketing enterprises from 2011 – 2024 as our sample. After rigorous processing, we got 5206 valid observations. Results show marketing performance significantly and positively drives brand internationalization. It directly propels the process and indirectly accelerates it by boosting sales growth. Also, higher inventory turnover fosters brand internationalization and enhances marketing performance’s driving effect.
