Entrepreneurial Marketing as a new way of running business - Conference paper
Abstract
We are witnessing that global and domestic business
environment became unstable for small and medium enterprises causing traditional
marketing practices to make SMEs vulnerable and lost in the market. Business
owners and managers must learn new innovative marketing actions. The aim of
this paper is to provide the literature review on this relatively new research
field, definitions of EM and the EM dimensions as the base for innovative
marketing activities. This study will enhance the importance of new marketing
paradigm as an innovative way of setting up the strategy of the SMEs and will
recommend future research directions in this field.
Many academics focused their
research on entrepreneurship and marketing in the last three decades as they
witnessed that companies need new strategy when facing turbulent times within
market environment, increased dynamics and global competition today. They have
been aware that entrepreneurs and managers must put aside traditional marketing
and management principles and replace them with innovative actions within new
strategy of running the business which is a connection of entrepreneurship and
marketing and called Entrepreneurial marketing (Kraus et al., 2010). It is considered a new and promising research field (Sadiku-Dushi et al., 2019) with emphasized entrepreneurial, customer-oriented, market
driving marketing approach that works particularly good under resource
limitations (Eggers et al., 2020). Entrepreneurial marketing should be viewed as a new
paradigm which connects marketing and entrepreneurship constructs into one
broad concept where marketing is transferred in a process used by firms to act
entrepreneurially (Collinson, 2002; Collinson
& Shaw, 2001). It has been recognized as
such within the companies based on their need for overcoming modern barriers,
for becoming more competitive by establishing new processes and ways of
managing complete business operations within and outside the company.
Globalization made markets to become available to everyone, especially in
online world, which made difficult for entrepreneurs and companies to quickly
and efficiently build competitive advantage in certain business segment.
Instead of this, the company had to create, invent and define new competitive
processes in every segment of their business. As a result, traditional
marketing principles were overridden by innovative, proactive and detailed
marketing approach to every business process with a little higher risk. Having
in mind that these innovative marketing actions were firstly used by small
companies and entrepreneurs, who were forced to create new processes due to the
lack of resources in all fields, researchers defined it as entrepreneurial
marketing (EM).
There is no general
definition about which most of scholars agreed upon at the moment. The term is
commonly associated with marketing activities in small firms with limited
resources which are dependent on creative, original and innovative strategies
in the market. Morris, Schindehutte,
Walton, et al., (2002) described it as unplanned,
nonlinear and visionary marketing actions taken by entrepreneurs. EM is formed
as an organizational orientation with seven underlying dimensions,
pro-activeness, opportunity focus, calculated risk-taking, and innovativeness,
customer intensity, resource leveraging and value creation (Hiscrich & Ramadani,
2017; Sadiku-Dushi et al., 2019). T
Researchers studied the
entrepreneurial marketing (EM) concept trying to define, identify and analyze
dimensions of entrepreneurial marketing. (Hill & Wright, 2000;
Morris, Schindehutte, Walton, et al., 2002; Kraus et al., 2010; Eggers et al.,
2020). There were several studies done on defining
EM (see e.g, (Bjerke & Hultman, 2002;
Kraus et al., 2010; Morris, Schindehutte, Walton, et al., 2002; Stokes, 2000).
To understand all factors
included and to define EM with wider area, we will refine the definition of Eggers et al., (2020), who based its definition on Kraus et al., (2010) combination of marketing definition of the American
Marketing Association (Gundlach, 2007) and the characteristics of entrepreneurial orientation (EO).
Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) affects positively firm performance (Vora et al., 2012), therefore we expect that EM influences performance in
positive manner, which is showed in the case of Kosovo by the (Sadiku-Dushi et al., 2019), Saudi Arabia by(King Abdulaziz University,
Saudi Arabia & Rashad, 2018), Pakistan by (Aslam et al., 2018), Indonesia by (Hadiyati & Lukiyanto,
2019). Entrepreneurial marketing
actions are considered to be helping entrepreneurs to develop their businesses
with smaller costs and introducing innovative ways of business operations.
The goal of this study is to
answer the question: what is Entrepreneurial Marketing and how important is for
SMEs? We will present the development of entrepreneurial marketing as a new
research field, including the definitions in the literature, in the first part
of this article. In the second part we will explain the importance of
entrepreneurial marketing as a new strategy for small and medium companies and
how it can be used to upgrade their businesses. Finally, the new research
directions will be proposed. It is new topic which can help our shareholders to
prevail todays challenges especially economic crisis caused by Covid-19
pandemic, therefore the problem in Bosnia and Herzegovina is that
Entrepreneurial marketing as a term and as a strategy is completely unfamiliar
to the SME’s owners and managers.
The expected outcome of this
research is to fill the gap in the literature by doing a first study that will
present entrepreneurial marketing as a new way of running the business and a
new strategy for SMEs in Bosnia and Herzegovina including all authors who
published in SSCI journals on this topic. Bosnian researchers and business
community will gain additional knowledge and know-how which can be considered
as a direct scientific contribution.
Almir Tahirovic
Published at 7th International Symposium at International Burch University which was held in 2021 in Sarajevo.
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