An empirical study on the factors influencing international marketing strategy development among successful exporters in Australia

Ricky Yue-Mun Tang

The development of international marketing strategy is fundamental to the success of any business attempting to market their products and/or services overseas. There are many factors, both internal and external that impact on the decisions in the development of international marketing strategy. This research will examine the international marketing strategy practices of successful Australian exporters; investigate what factors these businesses consider and how these factors are related to the effectiveness of the strategy development decisions. Hence, the objective of this study is to explore the research problem relating to determining the factors considered by Australian successful exporters in developing their international marketing strategies and the relationship, if any, between the strategic developmental decisions and a range of context variables. The findings of this research will benefit both the academic and practitioner arena, contributing to a better and improved understanding of the factors influencing the development of international marketing strategies that would lead to an increase in Australia’s successful exports to overseas markets. The target population selected for this study were all successful Australian exporters who were either finalists or winners of the various categories of the Australian Export Awards for the five years from 2003 to 2007. This study was carried out solely in Australia from January 2007 to February 2010. The mixed methods research methodology employed in this study includes qualitative methods through in-depth interviews in the exploratory research stage and quantitative methods using an online survey questionnaire in the descriptive and causal research stage to test the hypotheses developed from the literature review. From the literature review carried out, several factors were found to have an impact on the decisions for the development of international marketing strategy. These include: market and industry factors in both domestic and foreign markets, the firm’s internal factors, foreign environmental factors and public and private support networks in the foreign markets. Thus, four hypotheses were developed based on these factors to be tested in the descriptive and explanatory research. These factors were further validated in the qualitative study. Subsequently, an online survey instrument in the form of a questionnaire was designed with all of these factors as variables to be emailed to a sample of respondents selected randomly from the target population. The collected data was screened, cleaned and several statistical tests were performed using SPSS version 14.0 for Windows software to analyse the data. However, due to the lack of statistically significant results from the analysis of the survey data, the four hypotheses were not supported. It is believed that this study is one of the few undertaken to examine the factors influencing the development of international marketing strategy of Australian exporters. It is hoped that future research will replicate this study in other countries. Such studies will not only substantiate this research, but also offer new insights into understanding the factors influencing the decisions in the development of an international marketing strategy on a global basis.

An empirical study on the factors influencing international marketing strategy development among successful exporters in Australia

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An empirical study on the factors influencing international marketing strategy development among successful exporters in Australia

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