BUS602: Marketing Management

All hypotheses posited in the study except H4 are found to be statistically significant and therefore support the entrepreneurial marketing model in Fig. 2.

Environmental turbulence significantly impacts on the entrepreneurial and market orientation of the firm. This requires firms to be adaptable and flexible in dealing with competitors and customers to be innovative and entrepreneurial. Strong entrepreneurial and market orientations, leads to a different approach and perspective to the marketing function.

In a turbulent environment, the firm owners need to be entrepreneurial while emphasizing the marketing function. A strong entrepreneurial and market orientation enables firms to make quick decisions and thus opens new opportunities. The entrepreneurial firm has to customize its marketing efforts and to come up with variety of products and services for various segments. As a result the firms engage in innovative, proactive, opportunistic, risk taking, customer focused, and value added marketing activities.

Market orientation also significantly impacts marketing capabilities. Market orientation capabilities influence and augment the marketing capabilities of the firm. Entrepreneurial orientation and marketing capability significantly impact the firm performance. Entrepreneurial orientation is also reported to impact the marketing capabilities of innovative firms.

Table 3 Total effects

The research findings have the following managerial implications. The new technology based firms are recommended to invest in developing entrepreneurial and market orientation to further develop marketing capabilities for better firm performance. A strong entrepreneurial orientation not only helps managers to identify and pursue new opportunities, but also helps them to identify and arrange the resources necessary to pursue these opportunities. Entrepreneurs need to proactively engage in acquiring information to predict future trends and then develop strategies accordingly.

This information acquired is used in discovering the unmet latent needs that are not apparent to competitors. The knowledge of these latent needs helps and guides the firm to develop the relevant marketing capabilities. Firms with higher marketing capabilities have a competitive advantage as compared to firms with a lower degree of marketing capability. 

The research further suggests that market research, market management in terms of segmentation, managing the marketing programs, and promotion are relatively more important marketing capabilities in the context of the small new technology based firms. It is recommended that resources shall be allocated for the development of these capabilities on a priority basis. Turkish small technology firms should develop their marketing skills in order to enhance their brand value and by doing so, to get a longer-term competitive advantage which will lead to high performance.