International Marketing Strategy in Emerging-Market Exporting Firms

Unlike their counterparts in developed markets, emerging-market firms are characterized by limited resources, including international experience and access to relevant information, which are essential for developing suitable international marketing strategy (IMS). Under such circumstances, strategies are expected to produce suboptimal results, especially when targeting competitive markets in advanced economies. Prior IMS research has largely focused on developed markets. In contrast, the authors examine IMS of exporters in Thailand, an emerging market. Despite major differences in environments and processes in emerging markets, they establish that Thai exporters that match their IMS to local market conditions realize superior performance, as predicated by strategy coalignment. The authors validate these results and discuss emerging-market firms’ capacity to adapt their strategies and succeed in highly competitive advanced economies, despite relative inexperience, volatility, and information asymmetry at home. Exporting remains of critical importance to the economies of emerging markets, and the findings provide greater optimism for their firms’ ability to address host-market conditions in their marketing strategies, as well as pointing to the competitive threat posed by these emerging-market neophytes.