Exporting Your Goods
Competitive Positioning Analysis
Just as in expanding within Canada, you will be most successful if you are clear about your competitive positioning in relation to your export market. The following four questions and answers can help you with this clarification:
How can we leverage our strengths in the export market?
How can we mitigate our weaknesses in the export market?
What are the main challenges that we will need to manage?
What issues should our export marketing plan cover?
How can we leverage our strengths in the export market?
You will want to design a strategy that builds on strengths like the following:
- Staff with knowledge of your target export market
- Contacts into the export market through satisfied customers
- Efficient production systems
- A quality management system that can make it easy to comply with national standards
- Experience in working with agents or partners
How can we mitigate our weaknesses in the export market?
You can hire experts to manage the areas where you are weak or lack experience (e.g., international logistics), and you can partner with other firms who have complementary expertise in your areas of weakness.
What are the main challenges that we will need to manage?
The main challenges you are likely to face are:
- Adapting to the local cultural values and business practices
- Meeting all the regulatory, certification, and testing requirements
- Winning foreign contacts and customers if you choose to enter the market without a local agent or partner
- Financing export market development
- Managing all of the export-related documentation
- Not getting paid
- Not having enough information on trade agreements, tariff schedules, and legal requirements to do business in the export market
What issues should our export marketing plan cover?
- Introduction (who, what, where, how, why)
- Target markets (what is the company’s initial proposed market, does the company fit in this market, varieties of products, targeted user groups, where are the products purchased, etc.)
- Market demands (competition and their products/services, market share, public demands, long range plan, etc.)
- Product pricing (consumer acceptance price range, product cost breakdown, sufficient margin, etc.)
- Distribution channels (kinds of distribution channels, get product/service to end-user, costs, delivery terms, packaging, trade terms, minimum inventory levels, etc.)
- Promotion (communications package, budget)
- Advertising (radio, television, newspaper, website)
- Selling (type of sales person, sales training program, tools to sell, sales effectiveness)
- Sales promotion (what type and cost are planned)
- Publicity (how to introduce the company and the products in the market)