Calibrating Marketing Adaptation Along the Global Value Chain: A Marketing Adaptation Index for Export-Oriented Textile Firms in Uzbekistan

Export-oriented textile producers in emerging economies are moving from yarn and fabric towards finished and own-brand goods. Each step up the value chain hands the firm marketing decisions that a lead buyer used to take. This paper asks how much a firm should adapt its marketing programme to a foreign market at each stage, and how that degree can be measured and managed.
The paper synthesises the standardisation and adaptation literature with global value chain (GVC), dynamic-capability and institutional theory, derives five propositions, and develops a three-stage calibration model (diagnose, calibrate, monitor). It specifies a Marketing Adaptation Index (MAI) that scores realised adaptation of the four marketing-mix elements on a 0–1 scale with analytic-hierarchy-process weights, and a Required Adaptation Index (RAI) that benchmarks the level a venture’s value-chain position, institutional distance and product type call for. The framework is illustrated with UN Comtrade and national statistics for Uzbekistan’s textile exports, 2017–2025, and a validation protocol is set out for textile exporters in the Bukhara region.
Uzbekistan’s revealed comparative advantage in textiles and clothing rose from 3.95 in 2017 to 5.47 in 2023, while the share of finished goods in textile exports climbed from about 39 per cent in 2024 to 52 per cent in January to November 2025. The framework shows why this upgrading raises the required degree of adaptation and shifts its locus from technical product attributes to communication, branding and distribution. Performance is argued to depend on fit, that is, on the gap between realised and required adaptation, rather than on adaptation as such.
The propositions and the index await firm-level testing; thresholds for the adaptation gap are provisional until the pilot study reported in the protocol is completed.
Managers obtain an element-by-element diagnostic that tells them where to standardise and where to adapt for a given market; policy makers obtain a yardstick for export-promotion instruments tied to the national target of US$4.0 billion of textile exports in 2026.
The paper joins two literatures that rarely meet, GVC upgrading and marketing-programme adaptation, and converts the strategy fit argument into a measurable gap that can be tracked over time.