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Office Depot's generous support of the Journal of Small Business Manage- ment's Small Business Research Forum and special issue on marketing and.
Journal of Small Business Management 2008 46(1), pp. 46–49

A Commentary on Current Research at the Marketing and Entrepreneurship Interface* by Morgan P. Miles and Jenny Darroch

Office Depot’s generous support of the Journal of Small Business Management’s Small Business Research Forum and special issue on marketing and entrepreneurship has resulted in a series of excellent paper presentations from which this special issue was developed. The two papers that we had the pleasure to work with, and in one case actually present for the authors, were “Brand Management in Small to Medium-Sized Enterprise,” by Pierre Berthon, Michael T. Ewing, and Julie Napoli and “Understanding MarketDriving Behavior: The Role of Entrepreneurship,” by Minet Schindehutte, Mike Morris, and Akin Kocak. We will discuss each paper in terms of what makes the paper important to scholars who work at the marketing and entrepreneurship interface, potential extensions, and the common theoretical domain that both papers converge upon.

Brand Management in Small to Medium-Sized Enterprises This paper is an extension of the Ewing and Napoli (2005) brand orientation scale for not-for profits applied to a for-profit small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) context. Berthon, Ewing, and Napoli (2006) contribute greatly to our understanding of the value of an intangible asset (the brand) in the ability of an SME to leverage marketing capabilities to build competitive advantage. The authors propose that brand management practices (BMPs) are performance drivers and those BMPs can be used to help “differentiate highversus low-performing” SMEs and large organizations (Berthon, Ewing, and Napoli 2006). BMP metrics were derived from Keller’s (2000) brand report card and

*We would like to express our sincere appreciation to Office Depot for their financial sponsorship of both the Symposium and this special issue. Their generous support has provided an opportunity for marketing and entrepreneurship scholars to work together on the important question of developing an understanding of the interrelationship between marketing and entrepreneurship in the SME context. We hope that this issue will stimulate further empirical and conceptual research at the marketing/entrepreneurship interface that is both managerially useful and academically constructive. Morgan P. Miles is professor of marketing at the Department of Management, Marketing, and Logistics, College of Business Administration, Georgia Southern University. Jenny Darroch is assistant professor of marketing at the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management, Claremont Graduate University. Address correspondence to: Morgan P. Miles, Department of Management, Marketing, and Logistics, College of Business Administration, Georgia Southern University, P.O. Box 8154, Statesboro, GA 30460-8154. Tel: 912-681-0777. E-mail: [email protected].

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Ewing and Napoli’s (2005) nonprofit brand orientation scale. These items were then adapted for SMEs in a forprofit context. This procedure resulted in a 37-item scale that purports to measure 10 BMPs dimensions. After a reliability assessment, three scales were found to have notably high coefficient alphas (.80 or greater): (1) “using the full repertoire of marketing activities to build equity”; (2) “managers understand what the brand means to consumers”; and (3) “company monitors sources of brand equity.” Organizational performance metrics were subjective and included questions about the firm’s relative return on investment, market share, and ability to serve its customers. Berthon, Ewing, and Napoli (2006) found that BMPs do, indeed, influence organizational performance in a significant and positive manner. In fact, BMPs may be a very effective way for SMEs to enhance their ability to create competitive advantage. The authors also found that there were some differences between the BMPs of large organizations and the BMPs of SMEs that may be a function of resources and capabilities. Three major contributions of the Berthon, Ewing, and Napoli (2006) study may be used for further research at the marketing/entrepreneurship interface. The first contribution is that SMEs, in fact, use marketing and leverage BMPs differently than larger, better-resourced organizations. Differences were found in the ability to both monitor customer needs and measure the effectiveness of BMPs between SMEs and larger organizations. This supports the work of many marketing scholars who suggest that the marketing processes are different in SMEs (see for example Buskirk and Lavik 2004; Bjerke and Hultman 2002; Collingson and Shaw 2001; Carson and Gilmore 2000; Hills and LaForge 1992). The paper also found that high-performing SMEs implement BMPs to a greater extent than

low-performing SMEs, thus showing the importance of brands and effective brand management in influencing firm performance. A further contribution is the development of psychometrically sound metrics for some of the dimensions of BMP adapted for SMEs. This work provides a foundation for the further development of an empirically based understanding of the marketing practices of SMEs (and also BMPs in other contexts).

Understanding Market-Driving Behavior: The Role of Entrepreneurship The work in this issue by Schindehutte, Morris, and Kocak (2006) greatly contributes to our understanding of the interface between marketing and entrepreneurship by suggesting that an entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is but one of many business orientations that a firm will adopt concurrently. An analogy can be drawn with individual personalities—we each have multiple personality traits that when combined comprise our personalities. Organizations each have multiple strategic orientations that when combined define the way in which those organizations respond to their environments. Schindehutte, Morris, and Kocak (2006) propose that all firms have an underlying degree of entrepreneurial orientation, which “plays a critical role in determining transitions among various strategic orientations over time” such as market and technology orientations (MO and TO, respectively). This notion of business being able to adopt multiple orientations allows future researchers to conceptualize the relationship between entrepreneurial and market orientation not in terms of an either/or but as complementary traits that may synergistically help a firm achieve success. However, a better understanding of this relationship

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between strategic orientations may also help future scholars explore organizational failures that ensue when the orientations act as competitive traits and work at cross-purposes. The work of Schindehutte, Morris, and Kocak (2006) illustrates that the need to use innovation to reconfigure, realign, and renew marketing and strategic processes and practices in the face of dramatic change as one of the driving forces in defining effective strategy for SMEs. However, in most cases, the ability to reinvent the business and drive markets is characteristic of new firms and, therefore, is difficult for an SME to achieve over sustained periods of time (Schindehutte, Morris, and Kocak 2006). Under this scenario, a new firm will display an entrepreneurial posture at launch but will tend to transition into a more administrative posture (or, in the context of the current paper, more market-oriented (Schindehutte, Morris, and Kocak 2006)) as it becomes more established (Covin and Slevin 1989; Slevin and Covin 1990). The challenge, then, is to recapture the entrepreneurial spirit that defined the firm in its infancy and allow an entrepreneurial and market orientation to coexist so that current markets are served while new markets are created (Drucker 1973). Therefore, managers are encouraged to work at the nexus of the marketing and entrepreneurship interface in order to deliver a portfolio of innovations that is consist of both market-driven and market-driving offerings (Hills, Hultman, and Miles 2006; Schindehutte, Morris, and Kocak 2006). At the same time, managers must accept that over time, the firm will alternate between periods of marketing emphasis and periods of entrepreneurship emphasis (Covin and Slevin 1990, 1989). Accordingly, managers are encouraged to frequently examine resources, routines, behaviors, and practices in order to ensure that, ultimately, the right mix of innovation outputs is achieved.

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The Interface between Domains The major intersection between the Berthon, Ewing, and Napoli (2006) and the Schindehutte, Morris, and Kocak (2006) papers is within the domain of branding. At the macro level, an obvious connection between the two sets of findings is to suggest that brand orientation should be added to the range of possible strategic orientations that define an organization. As previously mentioned, Ewing and Napoli (2005) operationalized Urde’s (1994) brand orientation construct by identifying a three-component brand orientation scale derived from Keller’s (2000) brand management report card. Thus, Schindehutte, Morris, and Kocak (2006) multitrait perspective of SME business orientation could be expanded to explicitly integrate Urde’s (1994) brand orientation along with MO, EO, and TO. For example, would market and brand orientations become stronger as the firm’s products mature in their respective product life cycles or would a technology orientation tend to emerge because of the competitive pressures faced during the growth stage of the product life cycle (PLC)? The relationship between brand orientation and market driving has yet to be fully understood and would be a fruitful area of future research. Another link between the papers, although less obvious, is the role of brands in a market-driving firm. When a firm engages in market-driving activities, it attempts to drive the market by shaping the structure, preferences, and behaviors of all market stakeholders (Hills and Sarin 2003; Kumar, Scheer, and Kotler 2000). If we accept a commonly held view that brands provide a mental model that connects and communicates to an organization’s stakeholders, allowing employees, customers, suppliers, and competitors to make sense of the organization and its values, then brands have a critical role to play during

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periods of market-driving activity when the firm must create primary demand and position its brand attractively within the relevant product/market space. Effective BMP will help create primary demand for the new product whereas communicating to stakeholders the value-creating potential of the firm’s entrepreneurial efforts. Indeed, it could be proposed that SMEs with strong brands and well-developed BMPs will find periods of market-driving more successful than firms with less wellmanaged brands. Therefore, future research might empirically link Berthon, Ewing, and Napoli’s (2006) measure of BMPs with the market-driving posture outlined by Schindehutte, Morris, and Kocak (2006) in order to measure the precise nature of this relationship.

References Berthon, P., M. T. Ewing, and J. Napoli (2006). “Brand Management in Smallto Medium Sized Enterprises,” Office Depot Small Business Research Forum Compendium: Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Bjerke, B., and C. M. Hultman (2002). EM: The Growth of Small Firms in the New Economic Era. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Edgar. Buskirk, B., and M. Lavik (2004). Entrepreneurial Marketing: Real Stories and Survival Strategies. Mason, OH: Thomson South-Western. Carson, D., and A. Gilmore (2000). “Marketing At the Interface: Not ‘What’ But ‘How’,” Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice 8(2), 1–7. Collingson, E., and E. Shaw (2001). “Entrepreneurial Marketing—A Historical Perspective on Development and Practice,” Management Decision 39(9), 761–766. Covin, J. G., and D. P. Slevin (1989). “Strategic Management of Small Firms in Hostile and Benign Environments,”

Strategic Management Journal 10, 75–87. ——— (1990). “Juggling Entrepreneurial Style and Organizational Structure,” Sloan Management Review 31(2), 43–54. Drucker, P. (1973). Management. New York: Harper & Row. Ewing, M. T., and J. Napoli (2005). “Developing and Validating a Multidimensional Nonprofit Brand Orientation Scale,” Journal of Business Research 58, 841–853. Hills, G. E., and R. W. LaForge (1992). “Research at the Marketing Interface to Advance Entrepreneurship Theory,” Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice 16(3), 33–59. Hills, G. E., C. M. Hultman, and M. P. Miles (2006). “The Evolution and Development of Entrepreneurial Marketing,” Office Depot Small Business Research Forum Compendium: Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Hills, S. B., and S. Sarin (2003). “From Market Driven to Market Driving: An Alternative Paradigm for Marketing in High Technology Industries,” Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice 11(3), 13–23. Keller, K. L. (2000). “The Brand Report Card,” Harvard Business Review 78(1), 147–156. Kumar, N., L. Scheer, and P. Kotler (2000). “From Market Driven to Market Driving,” European Management Journal 18(2), 129–142. Schindehutte, M., M. H. Morris, and A. Kocak (2006). “Understanding Market-Driving Behavior: The Role of Entrepreneurship,” Office Depot Small Business Research Forum Compendium: Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Slevin, D. P., and J. G. Covin (1990). “Juggling Entrepreneurial Style and Organizational Structure,” Sloan Management Review 31(2), 43–54. Urde, M. (1994). “Brand Orientation— A Strategy for Survival,” Journal of Consumer Marketing 11(3), 18–22.

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