EPRG Model
The EPRG model sorts a company's international mindset into four orientations, home-country first, locally adapted, regionally organised, or globally integrated, so you can see which one you're actually running versus which your ambitions need.
Four rungs climb from ethnocentric to geocentric, with your company's current position marked on one of them.
Reach for this when…
- Head office keeps overriding decisions that should be made locally.
- Every new market gets the exact same product with a translated label.
- You're expanding and nobody has agreed what 'global' should mean for you.
How to run it
- Name your default: do decisions and products currently start from the home market?
- Check each foreign operation against the four orientations: home-first, locally adapted, regional, or globally integrated.
- Test whether that default still fits your ambitions or is just habit.
- Decide market by market where local or regional adaptation actually earns its cost.
- Set which decisions stay central, which go regional, and which move fully local, deliberately.
A worked example
Situation. Erik Lindholm runs Solvik, a mid-sized solar panel manufacturer in Gothenburg, Sweden, that had been shipping the same product spec and Swedish-only manuals to five countries.
Applied. Mapping his operation against the model showed a purely home-first default nobody had chosen on purpose; he moved installation manuals and financing terms to a locally adapted approach, keeping panel engineering centralised.
Result. Sales in Peru and Colombia picked up once the paperwork matched local finance rules, without touching the one thing worth keeping standard, the panel itself.
The catch
The model names four postures well but says little about how to move between them, and few companies are purely one type; most run a mix by function. Perlmutter's original 1969 version had only three orientations; Wind and Douglas added regiocentric in 1973 because so many multinationals organise by region rather than purely local or purely global. Treat it as a diagnostic for a conversation, not a box to tick once and file.
An ethnocentric default that nobody chose on purpose is not a strategy, it's an accident with a Spanish manual.
Origin: Howard Perlmutter, extended by Yoram Wind and Susan Douglas to add the regiocentric orientation