Luis Filipe Lages, Carmen Lages, and Cristiana Raquel Lages
Executive Summary
Annual reports rarely distinguish between the performance of domestic and export operations and even more rarely provide information on performance indicators of specific export ventures (i.e., a product or line of products exported to a specific client in a specific market). The authors create two business tools, the annual performance of an export venture (APEV) scale and the performance in exporting (PERFEX) scorecard, that enable the assessment of export performance at the corporate and exporting venture levels. These tools are designed to consider both objective and subjective metrics and short- and long-term dimensions.
The APEV scale comprises five dimensions: (1) an annual export venture’s financial performance, (2) an annual export venture’s strategic performance, (3) an annual export venture’s achievement, (4) the contribution of an export venture to annual exporting operations, and (5) satisfaction with an annual export venture’s overall performance. The APEV scale is used to generate the PERFEX scorecard to be included in organizational reports. A firm’s overall export success is considered the result of an aggregation of annual individual export ventures’ performances.
Overall, the authors expect to provide managers with an easy-to-use tool that helps disclose export ventures’ performances and that might be used as a guideline to establish annual goals, define exporting priorities (e.g., identify potential exporting problems, reinforce strengths), and communicate relevant information to the different stakeholders. Both the scale and the scorecard are intended as useful instruments for annual planning, management, monitoring, and improvement of exporting programs. In addition, export managers can use both tools to become more accountable and to ensure that their work has a greater impact on the different stakeholders (e.g., investors, shareholders, public policymakers).
At the public policy level, the usefulness of these tools is twofold. First, they can be used to make meaningful comparisons across exporting firms within an exporting country in a specific year and over time. Second, these tools could help public policymakers compare different export ventures within a firm. Because export assistance can be provided and monitored at the export venture level, these tools might help better allocate limited resources and assess the effectiveness of the export assistance provided to specific ventures.
Finally, both firms and governments should share a common definition and operationalization of an export venture’s performance. With the incorporation of the APEV and PERFEX tools in annual reports, this could be the first step toward a shared meaning. Although widespread inclusion of export ventures’ performance measures in annual reports could take years, the authors contend that the APEV measure and the PERFEX scorecard are the starting point.
Biography
Luis Filipe Lages is an assistant professor in the Faculdade de Economia at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Previously, he was a visiting scholar at Stanford Graduate School of Business and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management. He received his doctoral degree in Marketing and International Business from Warwick University in 2001. Lages’s areas of expertise and interest include marketing and performance metrics, international marketing, and export performance. He has recently published in Journal of Business Research, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Global Marketing, and Marketing Science Institute Working Paper Series, among others. He has consulting experience in both business and civic forums.
Carmen Lages is Assistant Professor of Marketing at the ISCTE Business School–Lisbon. She received her doctoral degree in Marketing and Corporate Communications from Warwick University. Her areas of interest include corporate communications and public relations. She has published in Journal of Business Research and European Journal of Marketing and has presented at conferences.
Cristiana Raquel Lages is a doctoral researcher in the Warwick Business School at Warwick University. Her areas of interest include export performance metrics and relationship marketing metrics. She has published in Journal of Business Research and Journal of International Marketing and has presented at conferences.
Journal of International Marketing, Vol. 13, No. 3, September 2005
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