Impact of Entrepreneurial Competencies on Adopted Innovative Marketing Strategies by Entrepreneurs: A Study on Small and Medium Boutique and Fashion House in Khulna City

Abstract

Purpose: This paper focuses on inspecting the relationship between entrepreneurial competencies and innovative marketing strategy in the context of small-and-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Entrepreneurial competencies are the set of divergent skills consisting of attitudes and related knowledge that entrepreneurs need to achieve their full potential and lead the firm to adopt innovative marketing strategies.
Design/Methodology/Approach: A conceptual model was drawn to show the relationship in quantitative nature using self-administered questionnaire between the relationship of the factors of entrepreneurial competencies and innovative marketing strategies based on previous literature. This study tried to find out whether the entrepreneurial competencies can be helpful for the adoption of innovative marketing strategy rather than the factors comprising entrepreneurial competencies with the help of regression analysis.
Findings: This study found that innovative marketing could be fostered if the entrepreneurial competencies are developed. Regression analysis in this study shows that four out of six hypotheses developed in this study is statistically significant. This study also generalizes that entrepreneurial competencies have a moderate positive relationship with the innovative use of marketing strategy.
Implications: Findings of this paper implicates an emerging view of marketing with respect to entrepreneurial competencies from the perspective of SMEs. This finding also relevant to the entrepreneurs in order to develop entrepreneurial competencies which will lead them to adopt innovative marketing strategies.
Originality/Value: Previous literature on strategic management and entrepreneurship focused on finding the linkage between entrepreneurship competencies and innovative marketing but very few of them gave any attention on the SMEs. In addition, very few scholars focused on the emerging countries like Bangladesh to find the relationship between entrepreneurial competencies and innovative marketing strategies. This study is directed towards studying the impact on SMEs in emerging economy which added distinct value to this paper.