An empirical investigation on factors influencing export of herbal supplements

Article history: Received July 28, 2013 Received in revised format 22 October 2013 Accepted 28 October 2013 Available online December 18 2013 During the past few years, there have been growing interests in business development of herbal supplements in many developing countries especially in Iran. Herbal supplements are used to cure many deceases such as medicating anxiety, acne, weight loss, depression, etc. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation to detect important factors influencing exporting herbal supplements. The proposed study designs a questionnaire consists of 31 questions, distributes it among 210 experts who are professional in the area of production and distribution of herbal supplements and using factor analysis, the study detects eight factors including supportive laws and regulations, organizational atmosphere, marketing structure, knowledge oriented, feasibility study, research and development, competitive strategy and partnership strategies.


Introduction
During the past few years, there have been growing interests in business development of herbal supplements in many developing countries especially in Iran.There is a steady demand growth on for herbal supplements in developed countries such as United States (Blumenthal et al., 2006).The marketing on herbal supplement has increasing trend specially over the cyber space (Morris & Avorn, 2003).Herbal supplements are used to cure many deceases such as medicating anxiety (Saeed et al., 2007;Lakhan & Vieira, 2010), acne, weight loss (Pittler et al., 2005), depression, etc. Ritchie (2007), for instance, considered the use of herbal supplements and nutritional supplements in the UK.Herbal supplements can also be considered as a potential for drug interactions in transplant recipients (Barone, et al., 2001).Even, there are some promises on medicating serious deceases such as cancer or liver decease using herbal supplements (Kumar et al., 2005;Levy et al., 2004;Temple et al., 2005;Kuhn & Winston, 2000).In fact, some researchers believe herbal supplement can be an alternative for adverse interactions with analgesic drugs (Abebe, 2002).However, there seems to be a word of cautious on relying herbal supplement for curing serious cancer deceases (Cassidy, 2003) and robust clinical trials are needed to prove the efficacy and lack of adverse impacts of such preparations.
According to (Harrison et al., 2004), more than one in ten adults were taking herbal supplements, with evening primrose oil, the most common supplement, applied primarily by women.Individual characteristics such as age, gender, ethnicity, and social class influenced the use of herbal supplements, but there was no evidence that this substituted for conventional medical care.There was also a weak evidence to support some popular herbal supplements.During the past few years, there was growing trend on easing regulation on herbal supplement (Gottlieb, 2000;Sahoo et al., 2010) and this has helped business owners to spend more on this market.

The proposed study
In this paper, we present an empirical investigation to detect important factors influencing exporting herbal supplements.The proposed study designs a questionnaire consists of 31 questions, distributes it among 210 experts who are professional in the area of production and distribution of herbal supplements.Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 0.81, which is well above the minimum acceptable limit of 0.70.In addition, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy and Bartlett's Test of Sphericity are calculated as 0.788, 1677.307,respectively.We first present details of some basic statistics associated with the data, which are summarized in Table 1 as follows, We plan to use factor analysis and since this method is sensitive to skewness of the data, we have decided to remove some questions from the survey.In addition, Table 2 shows details of communalities and as we can observe from the results of our investigation, the average of communalities is equal to 0.445, which is within acceptable limit.In order to extract important factors we first look at Scree plot demonstrated in Fig. 1 as follows,  3 demonstrates the results of factor analysis.Based on the results of Table 4, there are eight important factors including supportive laws and regulations, organizational atmosphere, marketing structure, knowledge oriented, feasibility study, research and development, competitive strategy and partnership strategies.Using factor analysis, we can verify each of these eight factors and Table 5 summarizes the results of our investigation.As we can observe from the results of Table 5, expect two cases, all other hypotheses are confirmed and Table 6 summarizes the results of our investigation.As we can observe from the results of Table 6, subsidiary rules is the most important factor followed by organizational climate, marketing organization, knowledge, market survey and research and development.

Conclusion
In this paper, we have presented an empirical investigation to detect important factors influencing export of Iranian herbal supplements.The proposed study has performed a comprehensive review on different items and using factor analysis, the study detected six factors influencing this industry.We hope the results of our study could help experts find major barriers in exporting herbal supplements and expand this market.In our survey, subsidiary rules were considered the most important item and the government needs to take the necessary actions on changing the rules and regulations on helping this industry grow.Marketing climate was the second most important factor and the experts are suggested to cooperate with public media to create more awareness on the advantages of exporting herbal supplements.

Fig. 1 .
Fig. 1.Scree plot The results of Scree plot shown in Fig. 1 indicate that there are eight important factors.Table3demonstrates the results of factor analysis.

Table 1
The summary of some basic statistics associated with the questionnaire

Table 2
The summary of communalities

Table 3
The summary of factor analysis after rotation

Table 5
The summary of testing all hypotheses

Table 6
The summary of six factors and their sub-components