Competitive Model of Iranian Sportswear Brands to enter International Markets

Nowadays, globalization has doubled the importance of competitiveness in the sportswear industry. There are a lot of sportswear brands in Iran that are not active in field of international trade due to their inability to compete with  foreign brands.. Thus, the current study aimed to investigate competitive model of the iranian sportswear brands to enter  the international  markets.A mixed method (qualitative and quantitative) was applied in the  research.  The  statistical population  included experts in the field of sportswear export (the first population) and 200 manufacturers of sportswear brands (the second population). Then 3 brands were selected from the first population via the Purposive sampling technique, and 132 brands were randomly selected from the second population according to Krejcie and Morgan table. The factors affecting competitiveness were identified using field studies and were approved in the second round of the Delphi method; then the model of the study was proposed. Finally, a questionnaire with 5 items and 74 questions  was designed  based on the Likert scale. The validity of the questionnaire was confirmed by  professors and experts and its reliability was also obtained in an initial sample of 30 people, with Cronbach's alpha of 0.96. The structural equation modeling was conducted by the IBM SPSS and Smart PLS.The results showed that  export, brand differentiation, marketing orientation , and strategic  orientation  affect the competitiveness of the iranian sportswear brands  to enter the international markets