Product adaptation is an important aspect of customizing an export market offering. To be successful, an adapted product must add sufficient customer value to justify higher costs and still yield an attractive return. The authors develop a strategic f...
Product adaptation is an important aspect of customizing an export market offering. To be successful, an adapted product must add sufficient customer value to justify higher costs and still yield an attractive return. The authors develop a strategic framework of the product adaptation process and test it on samples of U.S. and Korean export managers. One would expect that strategies and processes would be very different between large firms from these two particular countries, yet some surprising similarities are found. For large South Korean exports product adaptation is a clear contributor to profitability, while for large U.S. exporters the impact on profitability was unclear.