Paper info

RELATIONSHIPS WITH CUSTOMERS, SUPPLIERS AND COMPETITORS IMPLICATIONS FOR FIRM'S EXPORT PERFORMANCE

Maja Makovec Brenèiè and Vesna Žabkar

The paper was published at the 17th IMP-conference in Oslo, Norway in 2001.

Markets´ globalisation and competition made foreign markets increasingly viable and naturalopportunities for growth-oriented firms. This fact is even more important for firms originating from smallnational markets. In the global market atmosphere these firms are forced to build their export marketingstrategy based on relationships with their customers, suppliers or even competitors in order to besuccessful in their export market performance.Considering this fact the basic research question of the paper was to what extent the relationships caninfluence the firm's performance in foreign markets. Our research framework postulated that the firm'sexport performance is determined by relationships in addition to the type of industry and firm's internalforces. Three types of relationships were analysed: with customers, suppliers and with competitors.Several industries were compared in terms of their export performance characteristics. The generalconclusion of the research was that the indications were not sufficient to claim that firms from a smallcountry developed relationships with customers, suppliers or competitors intensively in order to improvetheir export market performance.