Indian Journal of Marketing


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Exporting has been one of the fastest growing economic activities around the world during the past two decades and has been fuelled by the world market liberalization and global competition. In fact, exporting is considered to be an important factor contributing to the maintenance of economic growth and prosperity. Specifically, from a macro perspective, exporting creates jobs, contributes to a balance of trade, increases national productivity, helps raise the standards of living or quality of life of a countrys population and provides currency stability. From a micro perspective, Leonidou proposed benefits that include generating business funds for company reinvestment and growth, diversifying company business across different markets, enhancing product innovation due to different foreign market needs, improving utilization of production capacity where the domestic market could not possibly absorb a firms full production capacity, developing superior management capabilities as the management deals with different needs and enhancing both - the firms sales and financial performance. This paper reviews extant literature of exporter-distributor relationships to identify the benefits and challenges associated with such relationships in an attempt to provide African exporters with the necessary insights on how they could also benefit from tying up with their overseas distributors. The paper emphasizes that exporter-distributor relationships can help improve export performance in Africa, where most countries are still grappling trade deficits and lack export diversity. Africas share in global markets is quite small, accounting for 2.1 percent in 2002 compared to 4.1 percent in 1980.India is world’s worlds second largest consumer market and is the youngest country of the world in terms of age. This sort of phenomena makes India a hot market to cater for domestic as well as multi-national companies. Thus, all the global players across the globe eyeing the Indian market, this has resulted inmore options for the Indian Consumers to experience. The consumer at large is considered to be price conscious, which has been a myth that has been revealed in this study, that focuses on some select international brands in the consumable category where in eight pair to brands were selected based on the market share. This among the pair, one brand is successful as being having the highest market share among the International Brands in the same category whereas, another brand is less-successful in the same category. Here, the term less-successful is been used for low market share and does not imply failure, as its market share may boost up than the rival brand in the future. Thus, this study explores the critical success factors for any foreign brand to succeed.