Richard Castaldi, Department of Management

Sanjit Sengupta, Department of Marketing 

Murray Silverman, Department of Management

San Francisco State University
San Francisco, CA 94132 

Abstract

Twin forces of globalization and consolidation are confronting the wine industry. While “old world” producers like France continue to dominate, “new world” producers like Australia are rapidly making inroads into the increasingly competitive global wine market. It is timely to study US wineries’ export performance and draw implications for international competitive strategy.  

We use an established three-dimensional conceptualization of export performance encompassing financial export performance, strategic export performance and satisfaction with exports. Drawing from management and marketing literature, we identify product-market and corporate strategy variables that should be related to export performance. Mail survey data from a sample of 133 wineries in the western US is analyzed using OLS regression.

Contrary to expectations, we find that three of the product-market strategy variables, brand image, product quality, and price-value, have no impact on export performance. However, intermediary performance and export commitment have a strong, positive relationship with export performance.

We further investigate the moderating effects of two moderator variables, price-quality segment and the type of intermediary relationship, on the relationships between intermediary performance, export commitment and export performance. We find that in the economy price-quality segment, export commitment has a greater impact on export performance than intermediary performance. However, in the luxury segment, intermediary performance has a greater impact on export performance than export commitment. With regard to type of intermediary, export commitment has a greater impact on export performance than intermediary performance when a wholesaler is used. Contrarily, intermediary performance has a greater impact on export performance than export commitment when an agent is used.