The art of SME export marketing: a case study

In this paper, it is proposed that integrating arts and culture into international trade missions will stimulate arts and crafts, as well as SME exports. It can also help to package trade missions so that they appeal to a wider audience and build SMEs’ relationships with international partners. Arts and cultural organisations – as well as individual artists – share features and interests with other SMEs. A case study illustrates that by piggy-backing on each others’ unique skill sets, industry, tourism and the arts can together successfully contribute to trade missions that promote a region and the products produced there. Lessons that the primary author has learnt from organising and participating in numerous trade missions are used to develop a framework that could potentially be utilised to develop similar programmes. The results should be of value to policy-makers, export development organisations, arts and cultural development organisations, and individual SME managers and artists.