Market Screening Table

Stop entering the market you happen to know. Filter candidate countries on hard requirements, score the survivors on the same criteria with weights you set first, and end with a ranking that states what you still have to prove.

Practitioner method. Screening markets on common criteria is sound craft, but research on market selection is fragmented and offers no single proven procedure (Papadopoulos & Martín Martín, 2011). Treat the scorecard as disciplined judgment, not measurement. Weights and scales are rules of thumb.

Use it when:

• You are choosing where to go first, or ranking several countries for the next three years.
• Opinions differ in the team and the discussion keeps returning to the market someone knows best.
• You need to show an owner, board or bank why one market came first.

Skip it when:

• You have only one market in mind and need to know if you are ready: use 7.10 Internationalisation Check.
• You have chosen the market and need to choose how to enter: go to 7.12 Entry Mode & Local vs Global.

Systematic screening is practitioner craft with a simple mechanism: comparing countries on the same criteria at the same time counters the pull of familiarity, which otherwise makes firms enter the markets they know instead of the ones that fit. Cavusgil (1985) is an early practitioner-oriented article on export market research. The staged narrowing used here, from many candidates to a few on deeper evidence, is this template's own design, and the field's theory remains fragmented.

A weighted grid has a known catch: the answer is only as honest as the weights, and Keeney (2002) documents how value trade-offs go wrong, above all when weights are tuned after a favorite has formed. On data, one caution with a named source: the World Bank (2021) discontinued its Doing Business report over data irregularities. Country rankings are inputs to check, not facts to inherit. So must-haves come first, because a constraint that merely lowers a score has quietly stopped being a constraint. Weights are fixed before scoring. And close totals are a finding: they tell you the decision needs judgment.

Must-haves are gates, not criteria. A market that fails one is out, however it would score.

Strong answer: "Must-have: we can serve customers in English or Swedish; the product needs no licence we cannot get in twelve months. Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain screened; Spain and Poland fail the language test." Not: "Must-have: a big market."

Company and product:

Markets to compare (three to eight at most):

Time horizon:

Must-have constraints (language, regulation, minimum size) and the markets they remove:

Illustrative example: the business, the scores and all numbers are made up. It continues the oat drink producer from 7.10.

Must-haves: serve customers in English, German or Swedish; products allowed on shelves without a licence we cannot get. Candidates: Norway, Germany, the Netherlands. Weights: size 4, growth 3, willingness to pay 5, competition 3, regulation and setup 3, channels 4, economics 5, risk 2.

Norway and Germany are three points apart, so the numbers do not separate them. A buyer who worked in German grocery says the listing windows are the hard part. Decision: the Netherlands first as the learning market, Germany staged after the first ten customers, Norway parked. Assumptions to validate: that a distributor accepts the margin; that shoppers pay the price.