Successful exporting: Exploring the transformation of export product portfolios

This paper examines the transformation of export product portfolios of highly successful exporters. Food manufacturers from a developing country (Greece) are investigated. Using an in-depth exploratory design involving a limited number of cases, it looks more precisely at the composition of product portfolio at initiation and development of exports, new product development for exports and export product elimination. Among the main findings, the foreign (FMD) versus domestic (DMD) market dependence of the focus exporters had a major effect in the transformation of the export product portfolios, FMD exporters carried out adaptations to a greater extent and developed more products than DMD exporters. Small FMD exporters seemed to lag in export product innovativeness and initiated exports with lower differentiation-private label in contrast with DMD firms which developed exports with higher differentiation own branded products. Furthermore, new product development for exports was irregular and diverged from formal incremental development. Last, but not least, export product elimination is much different from its counterpart in domestic marketing. Six different categories of export elimination may be distinguished. Five incidents of export product elimination falling in three categories were identified. Precipitating circumstances varied for each category. Fourteen propositions are forwarded for further investigation.