Marketing for small-to-medium enterprises 769
marketing activity. This is in recognition that
marketing decisions are often inseparable
from any other decisions in an SME. Many
entrepreneurs/owners/managers will perceive
themselves to have limited marketing ability,
primarily because their prior interests and
background mean that they are unlikely to bring
meaningful marketing experience and skills to a
business. Many will bring a ‘technical’ compe-
tency to the enterprise. Many will learn new
competencies as the business develops. Primary
amongst these learned competencies is that of
‘doing business’, which is the manifestation of a
range of competencies coming together as
contributors to decision making. Again, much
has been written about management and deci-
sion making competencies; as many as several
hundred have been identified (Mintzberg, 1973;
Boyatzis, 1982; Koontz et al., 1984; Kotter, 1990;
Tichy and Charan, 1991).
Obviously, since marketing is derived from
management, many of the known management
competencies could be relevant to marketing in
some way. Consideration of what the market-
ing job entails will group marketing into two
categories, those competencies which are ana-
lytical and those which are creative. However,
in once again taking account of the hugely
strong influential characteristics of SMEs and
entrepreneurs/owner/managers, such compe-
tency groupings need to be adapted and
refined to suit these inherent characteristics.
Taking account also of the interactive related-
ness of SME decision making it is important
that competency marketing in SMEs is compat-
ible with this dimension.
Most entrepreneurs will learn their mar-
keting skills by experience and practice.
However, it is not uncommon to hear entre-
preneurs describe marketing as ‘just common
sense’, or ‘I don’t know anything about
marketing’ whilst demonstrably performing
marketing activity. Indeed, entrepreneurial
characteristics/competencies/skills can be
closely aligned to marketing characteristics,
for example, both have characteristics of vision
and creativity; communication is inherent to
both;adaptabilityandflexibilityalso;opportun-
ismis another common competency factor. On
this latter factor entrepreneurs will often per-
ceive themselves to be opportunistic to the
point of enthusiasm; recently for example, an
entrepreneur, in responding to the notion of
problems experienced stated, ‘I don’t see prob-
lems, I see opportunities’.
Taking cognisance of the above dimensions
and focusing upon the one most significant core
competency concept for SMEs it is that of
experiential knowledge. This contains four sig-
nificant marketing competencies which are
entirely compatible with the entrepreneurial
way of doing business. One competency com-
ponent is knowledge itself; such knowledge
will cover a range of aspects, particularly about
how to do business and what is needed to do it
successfully. Knowledge is a significant compe-
tency, in a variety of ways; it can relate to
technical expertise, business acumen, including
knowledge of the market environment, etc. A
second competency component is experience
derived from accumulated knowledge of doing
business and which is evolved and developed
by accumulation of experience over time, learn-
ing from successes and failures. It is obvious
how these two competency components are
integral to experiential knowledge; however,
there are two further competency components
which contribute significantly to experiential
knowledge, one is communication competency
which reflects both the marketing and entrepre-
neurial focus of SME decision making. Com-
munication competency is a reflection of an
ability to communicate to and with all inter-
active parties. It is a competency which can be
improved through the development of knowl-
edge and experience competencies. A final
competency, the level of which is clearly
derived from the accumulation of the others, is
that of judgement ability which clearly impacts
upon the quality and timing of decision
making.
From a marketing in SME perspective,
these four competencies can be considered
together, because of their clear interaction and