Title: Effective targeting of national export promotion programmes for SMEs

Authors: Dafnis N. Coudounaris

Addresses: Department of Industrial Marketing, e-Commerce Research Group, Lulea University of Technology, Lulea SE 971 87, Sweden

Abstract: This paper aims to assess the effectiveness of 42 export promotion programmes among 46 Cypriot export manufacturing SMEs. The two-step method of evaluating the effectiveness of export promotion programmes considers firstly, qualitative measures, i.e. the level of awareness, adoption and usefulness of the export promotion programmes, related to the organisational, the internationalisation and export performance parameters, and secondly, quantitative measures, i.e. the number of the significant differences of the above parameters. The most important categories of export promotion programmes for modification are financial aspects of marketing, marketing mix, education and training and market targeting. The proposed model shows that there exist positive relationships between the levels of usefulness and adoption, awareness and adoption and usefulness and awareness, provided that there are significant differences among the sub-parameters, i.e. firm's size, product type, export distribution method, export regularity and export profit intensity. The excess vs. the lagging of satisfaction of users of export promotion programmes, play an important role for motivating export managers for higher levels of export performance.

Keywords: export promotion programmes; firm performance; export performance; exporting SMEs; manager satisfaction; export managers; Cyprus; manufacturing SMEs; small and medium-sized enterprises.

DOI: 10.1504/IJGSB.2012.049253

International Journal of Globalisation and Small Business, 2012 Vol.4 No.3/4, pp.242 - 283

Received: 27 Dec 2010
Accepted: 04 Oct 2011
Published online: 30 Aug 2014 *

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