Entrepreneurial marketing in small enterprises

This chapter introduces state-of-the-art viewpoints from established researchers in the study of entrepreneurship and marketing in small and growing enterprises. Researchers in small business emphasize the significance of marketing along with management and money for effective entrepreneurial growth strategies(for example, Brush, Ceru, & Blackburn,2009), while marketing researchers acknowledge the importance of entrepreneurship,which leads to innovation in the firm’s market orientation (Webb, Ireland, Hitt, & Tihanyi,2011). Marketing and entrepreneurship are acknowledged as two distinct disciplines. The entrepreneurial marketing (EM) concept has created cross-disciplinary fertilization of ideas,yet is firmly grounded in the study of marketing within small firms. EM is an approach to marketing that seeks to create or discover new market opportunities and then successfully exploit these opportunities by leveraging innovation, risk management, and first-mover advantage to create a superior market position.While mainstream marketing over the last century has tended to focus on large organizations selling products and services to static markets with defined segments, entrepreneurial marketing seeks to create new markets or serve existing markets with innovative and often disruptive offerings (Morrish, Miles, &Deacon, 2010). This chapter discusses pioneering work on entrepreneurial marketing by authors such as Carson (1990), Hills (1995),and Morris, Schindehutte, and LaForge (2002),along with contemporary research in the field.