Marketing for small business Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Marketing for small business - Essay Example preneurial marketing operations, and has compared them to the marketing theories given by marketing books, with the aid of focus groups and interviews with entrepreneurs. The author begins his argument by establishing differences between the operations of a normal company and those of an entrepreneur’s business. While his analysis of the traditional marketing approaches is correct in pointing out that they are planned, formal, and largely backed by thorough research, his views about entrepreneurial characteristics being unplanned seem questionable. It is true that entrepreneurial activities can be classified as being ‘informal’, and intuitive, but this does not imply that entrepreneurs do not make use of careful planning to run their businesses. In fact, planned processes play as important a role in the operations of entrepreneurial businesses as in those of corporate giants. According to Delmar and Shane (2003), entrepreneurs are better off using careful planning than learning through trial and error because it enables efficient utilization of already scarce resources. Hence, this distinction made by Strokes in his article appear s questionable to some extent. However, the other arguments presented in the article to establish the significance of entrepreneurial marketing are stronger than the one analyzed above. The author has correctly identified the marketing-related problems of entrepreneurial businesses, including less focus on marketing operations, limited customer base, scarce resources, as well as lack of specialized skills since there is too much reliance on the owner’s competencies. By conducting focus groups of the owner-managers of different entrepreneurial businesses, he has maintained that entrepreneurs see marketing as merely a tactic to attract customers through promotion, and are not aware of its strategic meanings like fulfilment of customer needs and product development. In addition, the observation that entrepreneurial operations are