Application of Entrepreneurial Marketing to the Marketing Mix: Why it Matters to SMEs in Malaysia?

Abstract

Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) is an interesting subject to explore on. SMEs faced many challenges in operate their business. In the rising turbulent market and with forceful competition and tremendously increasing demanding customers, marketers struggling in predicting consumer demands which changing over the time. Traditional marketing is no longer exceedingly effective and adequate for firms to compete in highly competitive business environment and in making strategic marketing decisions. In dealing with the unpredictable and uncertainty market, firms should be more entrepreneurial in their marketing. Due to that, past studies provide a solution using Entrepreneurial Marketing (EM)for all businesses that needs for competitive advantage in a unpredictable market. Even though a number of research has been conducted on the defining characteristics of EM, but the literature still lack discussion on practical implementation strategies particularly for those firms interested to apply these practices. This paper presents a review of the literatures on EM, highlights the overview of the EM, and then discussed the application of EM to the model of four Ps elements specifically defining characteristics of which are opportunity creation, innovation, personal networking, and resource leveraging. Based on the reviewing past literatures, this paper resolves by underlying that applying EM to marketing mix among SMEs or to larger firms should significantly increase the success and competitive advantage of a firm. Future study might explore on other elements of marketing mix that possibly affect the businesses performance