What is marketing for SME entrepreneurs? The need to market the marketing approach

The adoption of the marketing approach in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) is conditioned by their entrepreneurs’ conception of marketing, which may be different from that proposed by academics using different paradigms (i.e., the transactional, relationship, or inductional marketing). This implies that the potential benefits for SMEs, coming from its adoption, rely upon what their entrepreneurs really do when they think they are implementing a marketing programme. The purpose of the present article is twofold: to shed light on SME entrepreneurs’ conception of marketing, in order to verify whether their interpretation differs from that proposed by marketing researchers; and to assess the psychological determinants of the entrepreneurs’ intention to adopt a “marketing approach” (i.e., what they mean by that), by applying a well-known explanatory model of both human and organizational behaviors (i.e., Ajzen’s [1991] Theory of Planned Behavior, TPB). Results showed that Italian SME entrepreneurs possess a misconception of the marketing concept in comparison with the conceptualization proposed by academic researchers, and subjective norm, which in organization contexts can be interpreted as an indicator of corporate culture, seems to be the main determinant of the entrepreneurs’ intention to adopt the marketing approach.