Investigating the Effect of Firm Characteristics and Market Research on the Performance of Iran's Exporting Firms

Market research plays a key role in firms' success to attend foreign markets. Actually, using the information attained from market research, firms minimize probable risks and uncertainties of the attendance in foreign markets, thus acquiring a stable competitive advantage. The present research intends to recognize the factors effective on firms' attempts to examine market. It also wants to scan how the factors can affect the export performance of firms, investigating the relationship between variables including size, type of industry, and the strategic factors on market research. The methodology for the research is qualitative and the method for data elicitation is survey. To elicit data questionnaire was used. Moreover, using a stratified random sampling, 152 export firms were selected from the provinces of Tehran, Khorasan Razavi, Azarbaijan Sharghi, and Esfahan as the sample for the study. The results of the study show that market research is effective on export performance of export firms. They also indicate that there is relationship between firm size and market research and also between strategic factors and market research. However, the results indicated that there is no relationship between industry and market research.

Market research, firm size, industry, strategic factors, and export performance.