Evaluation of the efficacy of factors influencing on marketing SMEs

Article history: Received January 14, 2014 Accepted 10 June 2014 Available online June 2


Introduction
These days, many small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) cannot perform conventional marketing because of the limitations of resources, which exist to all SMEs.It is also because SME owner/managers behave and think differently from conventional marketing decision-making practices in large firms Gilmore et al. (2001) concentrated on SME characteristics and how these influence on marketing characteristics within SMEs.In a search for "alternative" marketing techniques, the inherent existence of the owner/manager's "network" in its different guises such as personal contact networks, social networks, business networks and industry and marketing networks and how these networks were applied was taken into account.Dobni and Luffman (2003) identified ideal behavioral profiles for organizations looking for maximization of performance by looking into the scope and effect of market orientation on strategy implementation.Reijonen (2010) provided some insights of how the concept of marketing was considered and put into practice in SMEs.In addition, the study examined whether the perceptions and practices differ according to the size, industry and customers of the SMEs.In this survey, marketing informed the customers about the enterprise and its offerings.SME marketers were also interested in building customer relationships.Marketing thought and practices could not be regarded as being uniform within SMEs.

The proposed study
This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of different factors influencing on marketing in SMEs.The study has been accomplished among 57 SMEs out of 70 active business units in hand made carpet.The survey uses a questionnaire originally developed by Merrilees et al. (2011) to determine the factors influencing on marketing SMEs.Fig. 1 demonstrates the proposed study of this paper, The population of this study includes all active SMEs on hand made carpet in city of Tehran, Iran.The sample size is calculated as follows, where N is the population size, and N=70, the number of sample size is calculated as n=57.Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 0.93, which is well above the minimum acceptable level of 0.70.

Personal characteristics of the participants
In our survey, 29.9% of the participants were male and the remaining 70.1% of them were female.Fig. 2 shows details of other personal characteristics of the participants.

Management capability
Innovation capabilities

Age
Years of education Job experience

Fig. 2. Personal characteristics of the participants
As we can observe from the results of Fig. 2, most participants were middle-aged people with good educational backgrounds as well as job experiences.Table 1 shows details of some basic statistics associated with various components of the survey.

Table 1
The summary of some basic statistics  The results of Table 2 indicate that there were some positive and meaningful relationships between various components of the survey.Table 3 shows details of some statistical observations on three questionnaires of the study.

Table 3
The summary of some statistical observation on the SEM implementation The results of Table 3 confirm that all components of the survey are within acceptable levels and this confirms the results of the survey.

The results
In this section, we present details of our findings on testing all hypotheses of the survey and they are summarized in Table 4 as follows,

Conclusion
In this paper, we have presented an empirical investigation to study the effects of various factors on marketing SMEs.The proposed study has confirmed that Market orientation influences positively on innovation capabilities, Market orientation influences positively on brand capability, Management capability influences positively on innovation capabilities, Management capability influences positively on brand capability.In addition, Innovation capabilities influences positively on efficacy of SMEs and finally, Brand capability influences positively on efficacy of SMEs.The results of survey have confirmed all hypotheses of the survey.The results of our survey are consistent with findings of Tang (1998), Keh et al. (2007) and Reuber and Fischer (1997).

Fig. 1 .
Fig. 1.The proposed study According to Fig. 1, the following hypotheses are considered for the proposed study of this paper.1.Market orientation influences positively on innovation capabilities.2. Market orientation influences positively on brand capability.3. Management capability influences positively on innovation capabilities.4. Management capability influences positively on brand capability. 5. Innovation capabilities influences positively on efficacy of SMEs.6. Brand capability influences positively on efficacy of SMEs.
of normal distribution and finally  is the error term.Since we have 96

Table 2
The summary of Pearson correlation ratios

Table 4
The summary of testing hypotheses of the survey