EXPRESS: Navigating Export Markets: How Regulatory Focus Shapes International Marketing Agility in SMEs

The world is undergoing major changes. In this context, international marketing agility (IMA), an emerging topic in international marketing research, is increasingly seen as crucial for success in export operations, particularly among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Accordingly, this research addresses the question of what drives firms to develop agile foreign marketing operations. Specifically, drawing on the Upper Echelons and Regulatory Focus (RF) theories, we examine how managers' psychological motivations, namely, their promotion and prevention orientations, shape a firm’s IMA. We also contribute to existing knowledge by examining the boundary conditions that influence the RF-IMA relationship, considering the moderating roles of both the manager’s and the firm’s export experience. The hypotheses were tested using responses from 347 managers of Portuguese SMEs engaged in export activities. The results suggest that promotion orientation is positively related to IMA. The findings further suggest that managerial export experience and firm-level export experience exert distinct moderating effects on the relationships between promotion and prevention orientations and IMA. Finally, we determined that the positive relationship between IMA and export intensity is strengthened by competitive intensity.