Effective targeting of national export promotion programmes for SMEs

This paper aims to assess the effectiveness of 42 export promotion programmes among 46 Cypriot export manufacturing SMEs. The two-step method of evaluating the effectiveness of export promotion programmes considers firstly, qualitative measures, i.e. the level of awareness, adoption and usefulness of the export promotion programmes, related to the organisational, the internationalisation and export performance parameters, and secondly, quantitative measures, i.e. the number of the significant differences of the above parameters. The most important categories of export promotion programmes for modification are financial aspects of marketing, marketing mix, education and training and market targeting. The proposed model shows that there exist positive relationships between the levels of usefulness and adoption, awareness and adoption and usefulness and awareness, provided that there are significant differences among the sub-parameters, i.e. firm’s size, product type, export distribution method, export regularity and export profit intensity. The excess vs. the lagging of satisfaction of users of export promotion programmes, play an important role for motivating export managers for higher levels of export performance.