What is marketing for SME entrepreneurs? The need to market the marketing approach

Abstract

In Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), the adoption of the marketing approach is conditioned by entrepreneurs’ own conception of marketing, which may be substantially different from that proposed, in a paradigmatic way, by academics under different names (i.e., the transactional, relationship, or inductional marketing). This implies that the potential benefits for SMEs, coming from its adoption, rely upon what entrepreneurs really do when they think they are implementing a marketing programme. Hence, the purpose of the present paper is twofold: (1) To shed light on SME entrepreneurs’ conception of marketing, in order to verify whether their interpretation differs from that proposed by marketing researchers; and (2) To assess quantitatively the psychological determinants of the entrepreneurs’ intention to adopt a “marketing approach” (i.e., what they mean by that), by applying a well-known model for predicting both human and organizational behaviors (i.e., Ajzen’s [1991] Theory of Planned Behavior, TPB). Results of this study carried out on more than 200 Italian SMEs showed that: (1) most Italian SME entrepreneurs possess a misconception of the marketing concept in comparison with the conceptualization proposed by academic researchers; and (2) subjective norm, which in organization contexts can be interpreted as an indicator of corporate culture (i.e., the pattern of shared values and beliefs about organizational functioning) (cf. Elliott and Jobber 1995), seems to be the main determinant of the Italian SME entrepreneurs’ intention to adopt the marketing approach. Implications are discussed.