Model for Products Positioning in Emerging Markets: A Case of Resources Seeking Chinese Firms in Nigeria

The Go Global initiatives of the Chinese government to encourage Chinese firms to be strategic players in the global business environment have attracted scholarship interest over the years. Nonetheless, there is a dearth of studies focusing specifically on the positioning strategies of Chinese firms in emerging markets. Hence, this study explores this research gap using the Nigerian Business environment as the contextual platform. It uses data from complementary sources of case study and in-depth interviews conducted with some of the key stakeholders such as respondents from resource-seeking Chinese firms, top management personnel of Chinese firms in Lagos and Beijing, government officials and some participants from non-Chinese firms in Nigeria. Findings show that Chinese products in Nigeria are positioned through four key factors which are affordability, availability, maintainability, and unavoidability. Accordingly, the focus of the firms in emerging countries as evident in the Nigerian case is to make the products affordable, easily maintainable, and widely available to consumers such that they consider it unavoidable. The data revealed that BTA provisions between the countries facilitated these key themes. The paper provides a valuable framework that unpacks the positioning strategy of Chinese market offerings in emerging markets.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of African Business on 12/02/2025, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/15228916.2025.2465111