ENTREPRENEURIAL MARKETING, ENVIRONMENTAL

UNCERTAINTY AND PERFORMANCE OF FAMILY FIRMS

Irfan Siddique, PhD Scholar, University of Central Punjab,
Irfan Saleem Assistant Professor, University of Central Punjab
Syed Gohar Abbas, Associate Professor, Sarhad University of Science & IT,
Peshawar. Email: [email protected]
Ahmad Zia, MS Scholar, GCU Lahore. Email: [email protected]
Abstract. Businesses in general and family SMEs in specific are
vulnerable to environmental uncertainty in underdeveloped
countries. Stiff competitions, technological bursts and market
turbulence appear as a catastrophe and a major cause for short
life of many family SMEs. A few family SMEs still exist and survive
in all these uncertain conditions. Various reasons been discussed
in previous literature and had proved the importance of
entrepreneurial marketing as one of the major sources of high
performances. The marketing strategies opted by family SMEs
having dimension of entrepreneurship, are not only self-beneficial
but also the cause of new market trends. The primary purpose of
this study is to consider the effect of opportunity vigilance,
consumer centric innovation, value creation and risk management
termed as entrepreneurial marketing and used as a fundamental
approach for family SMEs to survive and grab high performances
even under uncertain conditions. Results show that entrepreneurial
marketing in family SMEs is positively associated with high
performances even under uncertain environments. Previously
uncertain environments were considered as one of the major cause
for entrepreneurial marketing that does not qualify in our case.
Family SMEs use entrepreneurial marketing as their vital tool for
competitive markets to perform high irrespective of environmental
conditions i.e. either favorable or unfavorable.
Keywords: Family SMEs, entrepreneurial marketing, environmental
uncertainty and business performance
Introduction
Entrepreneurship! Consider as a catalyst for any sector’s growth and for the
development of any country. Enterprises start and vanish, besides many
reasons the intensity of environmental uncertainty is one of the acute reasons
for firm’s short life (Tahir, Sabir, & Shah, 2016). Many of the businesses

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prevail and survive while remaining in turbulent environments. They perform

well in same industries with same business models where others do not.
Research has proved importance of different functions adopted for firms’
survival and growth (Keh, Nguyen, & Ng, 2007). Most of the studies
researched the importance of marketing function as a success factor for any
business, either small or large (Fernández, & Nieto, 2005; Kotler & Levy,
1969). As per the study of Morgan (2012) marketing of firm is considered in
recreating and maintaining competitive advantage for better performances.
However, less been discussed about the entrepreneurial activities in family
firms and their impact on performance under environmental uncertainties.
Marketing is to control the constant dramatic changes, which occur in the
market where the firm operates. Peripheral to it, entrepreneurial marketing
refers to different activities and different levers used by firms to entertain the
needs of the customers and ensure their participation. Many researchers related
entrepreneurial marketing as an activity of SMEs (Renton, et al., 2015). The
SME marketing is going to be an unplanned one, non-structured and most
likely a “Surprise” (Hills, Hultman, & Miles, 2008). One of the reasons of its
being unstructured is sole decisions made by owners. The dominant coalition is
family in family firms do businesses in their own way and respond according to
the opportunities and challenges that occur in market.
Small firms vary in their nature of work and structure. By the burst of
technology, they are demarcated as high tech and low-tech firms. Research
suggested that the technology oriented firms do not focus much on
entrepreneurial marketing. Their belief in technology leads to financial
problems and results in diminishing success. However few studies relate
success of Family SMEs with marketing as their main ingredient rather than
technology (Bäckbro & Nyström, 2006). The marketing strategies adopted by
the Family SMEs are not the same as the strategies adopted by the larger firms
(Bettiol, Di Maria & Finotto, 2012; Pérez-Cabañero, González-Cruz, & Cruz-
Ros, 2012). On similar grounds, SMES marketing is not in accordance to
traditional marketing models or as taught in business schools, they are more
situation oriented and reflecting creativity. Recent literature in the field of
entrepreneurial marketing has developed theories, which are naive to the field.
Prior research proves the marketing capability of the firm as an impact on
its performance depending on firm’s own characteristics (Song, Nason, & Di
Benedetto, 2008). Profitability, customer satisfaction is positively associated
with the marketing culture adopted in firms (Appiah-Adu & Singh, 1999).
Effective marketing is also positively related to customer retention (Appiah-
Adu, 1999). The informal, disorganized and a novel marketing is performed
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and carried out in Family SMEs and differ from the marketing practices.
Conventional marketing theories and concepts are not fulfilling the marketing
gap of small and medium enterprises (Reijonen, 2010).
Uncertainty has also been a very critical concept in the theory of
organizational literature. Theories that explain the relationship between
organization and their environment studied the most and a big problem for
higher level management (Milliken, 1987). Further, it was found that the firms
are more proactive and do more innovation in uncertain environments due to
the reason that uncertain environment, entrepreneurship and marketing has a
positive relationship (Davis, Morris, & Allen, 1991).
This research addresses two basic objectives. One is to study the impact of
entrepreneurial marketing adopted by family SMEs on firm’s performance.
Second is to study the moderating role of environmental uncertainty in relation
to entrepreneurial marketing of family SMEs and firm performance. Our study
takes environmental uncertainty as moderator for entrepreneurial marketing
and firm’s performance. We address a question that what would be the role of
entrepreneurial marketing generally adopted by Family SMEs in uncertain
environmental seeking high performances. Thus, our study contributes in two
ways: it will highlight the importance of entrepreneurial marketing opted by
family SMEs in relation to the firm performance and secondly, it will
specifically discuss the environmental uncertainty factor and how
entrepreneurial marketing of family SMEs take that challenge and survive.
Entrepreneurial Marketing
In association to marketing, entrepreneurial marketing is not very old (Hills
& Hultman, 2011). Entrepreneurial marketing consist of public relations,
relationship marketing and on offering superior value to customers (Hills,
Hultman, & Miles, 2008). Conventional marketing is a planned and organized
process, it is deliberate and more formal (Kotler, 2012) while the
entrepreneurial behavior in marketing is unplanned, very much informal and
is based upon entrepreneurs willingness, his energy and his intuition to work
out and make things happen (Chell, Haworth, & Brearley, 1991). Due to the
mix interpretations of both marketing and entrepreneurship, it is difficult to set
a standard definition of entrepreneurial marketing. In literature entrepreneurial
marketing is taken in different aspects relating it to an activity of innovation
concentration to pure marketing of small firms (Bjerke & Hultman, 2004) to an
organizational process for value creation by pro-activeness (Backbro &
Nystrom, 2006). Our study will take the following definition given by Kraus,
Harms, and Fink (2010) by combining AMA definition and entrepreneurship
they stated it as,

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“Entrepreneurial marketing is an organizational function and a set of

processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to
customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that
benefit the organization and its stakeholders, and that is characterized
by innovativeness, risk-taking, pro-activeness, and may be performed
without resources currently controlled.”
This definition of entrepreneurial marketing highlights the characteristics
that mostly fall under family SME structures. As Family SMEs are more
flexible in response to market changes for exploiting opportunities, when
talking about innovation, they require flexibility. Thus Family SMEs are more
innovators. If there is any change in the market, Family SMEs will go for a
pro-activeness approach. Family SMEs do have pro-activeness because of their
simple and flat organizational structures with fewer barriers to communicate
and decide. In connection to entrepreneurial marketing, Family SME is affected
by the change factors, which are external. Entrepreneurial marketing is the end
product of marketing actions, entrepreneurial orientation of information and
decisions making (Hills & Hultman, 2011). The small and medium firms
exhibit novel sort of marketing combinations i.e. entrepreneurial marketing that
are different from traditional administrative marketing (AM) and these
combinations require a unique conceptual framework to understand its nature
and working (Hills, et al., 2008). We, therefore consider for our study family
SME marketing as entrepreneurial marketing.
In Family SMEs the most important marketing activity is selling, as their
survival depends upon their sales (Stokes, 2000). Family SMEs perform many
marketing activities yet they always have their main focus on their sales (Hill,
2001) and produce good sales. They also focus on customer needs but with
limitations. Mostly the main target of these firms is to create a sincere and a
close relation with few big customers (Reijonen, 2010) having very strong ties
with them. They have little budget and resources to promote their firm’s
products and services which they operate very carefully and that creates
required result. The marketing in all small and medium firms cannot be the
same because they vary according to their characteristics (Reijonen, 2010).
Stokes (2000) mentioned that the owners/entrepreneurs of small and
medium enterprises take marketing as set of actions applied to attract new
businesses. These people are not aware of the strategic meaning of marketing
as well as the philosophical meaning of it. They mostly attach marketing
meaning with selling and promotional activities. Family SMEs owners believe
that their businesses depend on word-of-mouth so they are not required of
doing any sort of traditional marketing for their enterprises. They do not opt
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traditional marketing activities in their enterprises but of unconventional

nature. The most important activity found is those enterprises is that they rank
recommendations (feedback) from their customers at the top of the marketing
activities they do (Stokes, 2000).
The environmental conditions make an impact on the market orientation,
entrepreneurial orientation and organizational climate of the firm. It creates the
firm to be engaged in entrepreneurial marketing and achieve the organizational
outcomes.
Firm performance
The importance of performance measurement has discussed from the
theoretical, managerial and empirical perspective. Moreover performance of
family firms is taken as a debate in literature. Fattoum-Guedri, Guedri, and
Delmar (2018) argue that performances of family SMEs depend on different
stakeholders. As per their study, one of the important stakeholders are their
block holders i.e. a specific shareholders having significant number of shares
and their decisions have strong effect on firm performance. Traditionally,
financial measures used to measure the firm performance in quantitative studies
and used revenue, return on assets, cash flow and return on equity to assess the
firm’s performance. whereas, non-financial measures also used to measure the
organizational performance (Gomez- Mejia 2007; Neely, 2002).
Goal approach measures the performance of the firm based upon the
attainment of the set goals by the firm. While the system resource approach
assesses the performance by the ability of the organization to attain the
resources required to maintain organizational system. These two solely focus
on a single dimension and that is the attainment of resources and goals. Apart
from these two, there are two more approaches that are complex in nature, the
stakeholder approach and the competitive value approach. These approaches
assess the performance from various aspects like customers, suppliers,
competitors and internal stakeholders as they may have their own perspectives
and goals. These two are more complex in nature and gives more integrative
view of performance. Among these approaches, goal approach mostly used, as
it can be easily measured. One more dimension of goal approach is that it suits
the small entrepreneurial ventures. Disclaiming objective measures, subjective
measures are considered better for the small businesses as entrepreneurs of
Family SMEs are reluctant to show their exact financial figures (Haber &
Reichel, 2005). Subjective measures are mostly used in researches related to
strategy and has been shown as valid and reliable (Appiah-Adu & Ranchhod,
1998)

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Murphy, Taylor and Hill (1996) studied 51 published studies on

entrepreneurship that used performance as a dependent variable and they found
that mostly the dimensions of performance, which were under consideration,
are growth, profit and efficiency. Financial performance is the core of the
business effectiveness domain but it does not fully represent the overall
performance of the firm. The senior management has started to give importance
to the non-financial measures as well but still, financial measures are measured
in giving rewards, bonuses and in determining out the business performance.
Financial measures like sales and sales growth used than the non-financial
measures. Research showed that firms give emphasis on both financial and
non-financial measures but financial measures are more influential. Profits,
sales volume and sales value are performance parameters and it indicates what
they desire from their marketing department. Nevertheless, in non-financial
measures the priorities are not clear as in financial measures and that’s why
financial indicators dominate over non-financial indicators in measuring
business performance and marketing performance. Aggarwal and Gupta (2006)
proposed that in order to have a long term customer satisfaction, employee
commitment and loyalty and market orientation, firms must give the right
amount of weight to the non-financial measures during marketing performance
appraisal.
Some studies need a combination of non-financial measures and financial
measures to get a more comprehensive performance analysis and evaluation.
Measuring marketing performance is becoming very essential in firms because
marketing drives profits, growth and sales. Non-financial measures include
market share, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. In different
performance studies, multiple measures like efficiency and effectiveness, input
measures like marketing assets, marketing orientation are used. The need of
non-financial measures came because researchers and managers thought that
there are still some elements of marketing efforts which are not measured
through the traditional financial measures (Clark, 1999). Growth in
employment and assets are performance indicators. Profitability is also a
measure used to measure the firm’s performance. It is because without the
profit, the firms cannot grow and firms cannot reinvest in their businesses. The
dimensions included in different studies to measure the profitability or growth
are net profit margins and return on assets (Fitzsimmons, Steffens & Douglas,
2005). However we take efficiency, profit and growth as the firm performance
measures and we develop our first hypothesis as
Hypothesis-1:Entrepreneurial marketing conducted by family SMEs is
positively associated with firm performance.

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Environmental uncertainty
Environmental uncertainty reflects in missing pattern, unpredictability and
any unexpected alteration in the environment, changes the organization’s
competitive context (Cannella, Park, & Lee, 2008). There are various sources
of uncertainty because many studies have suggested that it is a complex
construct (Downey, Hellriegel, & Slocum, 1975). Between all those, market
and technology is the most common known uncertain elements for firms.
Technological uncertainty is the complexity perceived about the technological
advancement. Places where new and rapid changes occur in technology, the
level of uncertainty is high. Market uncertainty is high where new markets are
emerging or the market is changing on a fast pace. The continuous and rapid
changing environmental conditions create turbulence; that require firms to keep
their pace with the changing technological advancements and customer
demands through product innovation. The rate of exploration of the firm and
the technological changes must be aligned to achieve competitive advantage
and sustainability. The intrapersonal functional diversity also increases because
of the increase in environmental uncertainty (Cannella et al., 2008).
In our study we took three main factors as environmental uncertainty:
Market turbulence, technological uncertainty and competitive intensity (Miller
& Droge, 1986). Market turbulence is related to the rate of change in customer
composition and their preference. Firms which operate in a more uncertain
market tend to change its products and services on continuous basis so that they
can cater their customers and fulfill their demands. Market turbulence refers to
the rate of change of customer needs, composition and their preference. It
results due to the fact of not having information regarding what is the desire of
the customers. High market uncertainty occurs when the firms do not know
who the customers, what they want and how they can be reached. While the
technological uncertainty refers to the change in the technology used to
develop products in an industry (Chen, Reilly, & Lynn, 2005). Competitive
intensity is the second factor. It indicates to the amount of competition
prevailing in the specific industry. More competition means more alternatives
for the customers. The third factor is technological factor, it refers to the rate at
which the technology changes (Jaworski & Kohli, 1993).
The technological uncertainty can be countered by the marketing
innovations and creative ways of doing marketing. By these innovations and
creative ways the concerns which the customers have regarding the products
and services delivered by the firm are reduced. These concerns are mostly
related to the advantages which are going to be achieved after the adoption of
the product in comparison to the existing products. Well in case of stable
markets, where set of customers are well defined and who have relatively

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stable preferences, competition in those markets are rather predictable and the
technological change is increasing on a slow rate. In such markets the emphasis
of enterprises shift from a novel and creative positioning to a continuous
execution of marketing activities revolving around few major and core
principles of the firm. Customers in such markets are from the early or late
majority who want proven and tested solution, reliable and acceptable service
and guaranteed results. Moreover, it also suggests that it provokes the thought
towards the competition on price. If the firm wants to compete on price then in
such markets a unique and creative marketing approach and strategy is also
required. Thus in predictable and stable markets more importance and
emphasis is led on execution (Slater, Hult, & Olson, 2010). One of the recent
studies conducted by Montez, Ruiz-Aliseda, and Ryall (2017) proposes that
competitive intensity adds value to the firm whatsoever they have taken either
in internal or external aspects. Therefore, we propose
Hypothesis-2: Environmental uncertainty influences family SMEs to high
firm performances.
Firms exploration may be a suitable choice for the firm in high degree of
environmental uncertainty because it put focus on innovation and marketing
activities for research (Tsai & Huang, 2008). The environmental uncertainty,
may at times require the firm to make itself able to respond to the quickly
changing environment and unforeseen changes in order to survive (DeSarbo, et
al., 2005).
Environmental uncertainty has been perceived as a central problem for a
firm. A lot of work has been done to understand its nature and complexity and
also their relationship with different variables. Environmental uncertainty is
reflected by two states; environmental and individual state. In environmental
state, firm assesses the environmental elements to build indexes that address
the variability present in the environment. And on the other, individual state is
based on the perceptions made by the administration. Uncertainty is defined as
the inability to judge the environment of the firm due to the unavailability of
resources or information to differentiate between the relevant and the irrelevant
data. Perceived environmental uncertainty exists where the administration is
unable to predict the happenings in the firm’s environment. When the
entrepreneurs are unable to understand the relations of the components of
environment with each other and are unable to judge the response of the
changes then perceived uncertainty is created. It affects the strategy to be
implemented by the firm. High level of uncertainty tends to move the firm
towards more diverse strategies so that it makes the firm less vulnerable. It
indicates that the firm will move towards diversification and thus it means it
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will move towards new products and processes. Environmental uncertainty is a

essential variable which connects the organizational environment with the
organization’s structures, processes and performances (Huber, et al. 1975).
In literature, innovation is found correlated positively with the
environmental uncertainty. Two reasons are there for this finding. First one is
that when there is a higher level of uncertainty in the environment it provokes
innovation by opportunity seeking and by adapting the occurring change.
Second reason is this, when there is a higher degree of innovation, it develops a
perception in the mind of managers that environmental uncertainty exists in the
market. The firms which are entrepreneurial in nature get more benefit from the
environmental uncertainty because it provides a higher source of innovation
and opportunity as compare to the certain environments. When the demand
changes of customer, industry’s technological changes occur, strategic relations
change so then it triggers the need for innovation. So, the entrepreneurial firms
working in uncertain environment must have a higher degree of innovation but
it’s also for the conservative firms in environmental uncertainty to innovate.
Entrepreneurial firms tends to find out opportunities and create innovations
while the conservative are forced for it in uncertain environment (Russell &
Russell, 1992).
Marketing and entrepreneurial orientations are highly influenced by the
environmental uncertainty. The external environment of the organization can
be termed as complex, threatening and dynamic. When managers sense a
higher level of environmental uncertainty, they face with fragmented markets,
smaller decision windows, more specialized resources, absence of resources
and products and lack of control over longer period of time. This entire thing
means that the firm needs to find new ways to compete in such environment
and tackle the problems. Entrepreneurial firms have been found with higher
degrees of environmental hostility and heterogeneity than the conservative
firms. Significant relationships are found between the environmental
heterogeneity, hostility and dynamism with the amount of risk taking,
innovation and opportunity seeking in successful firms and not in unsuccessful
ones. Environmental uncertainty has a great influence on the marketing of the
firm. Marketing is an important function of any firm that competes with in
uncertain external environment. Marketing input helps in incorporating social,
political, technological and other perspectives in planning and strategy making.
Marketing becomes important when firms change the way they compete.
Marketing is the function which competes and deals with the external
environment. Marketing logically comes more important with changes in the
external environment. This function is more flexible and innovative in such
uncertain conditions. Any firm’s marketing orientation is more crucial when
it’s in a state of uncertain order. Entrepreneurial firms do not only adapt the
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external environment but also changes it. Marketing should be made a function
which accept, manage and effect change (Davis, et al. 1991). Only those
companies survive and are successful that continuously build, create and apply
new and novel processes and products. (Claycomb, Dröge, & Germain, 2001).
In a recent study by Kwok et al. (2018) argued on the role of international joint
ventures in emerging markets where the prior research ignored the information
exchange, relationship capital and environmental uncertainty for high
performances. His study took the moderating effect of environmental
uncertainty and comes up with the result that it partially moderates the firm
performance. So we develop our second hypothesis as
Hypothesis 3: Environmental uncertainty positively moderates the
relationship between entrepreneurial marketing and firm
performance in family firms.
Conceptual Model
Entrepreneurial H1 Firm
marketing Performance
H2

Environmental
Uncertainty

Research Design
This section will include the population, sampling technique, sample size,
survey instrument and response rate.
Population
The study has been conducted on the textile industry of Pakistan. The
textile sector of Pakistan is very famous and mostly been run by family SMEs.
Most of the SMEs wok under informal economy and have unknown population
frame because many unregistered firms are also working in the sector and no
any official body does exist which has a complete list of its members. Only
those firms with less than or equal to 250 employees are considered and family
firms having ownership with at least two members involved in their operations
as done under the study of Kellermanns and Eddleston (2006) was taken for
data collection.

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Sampling technique
A survey method was used for this quantitative study using non-probability
snowball sampling technique. This sampling technique was the most
appropriate one as others were not fulfilling the sampling requirements. So, as
per our objective of the study only those firms were approached and sampled
which fulfilled the requirement of SME definition (Siddique, Saleem &
Abbass, 2016). Moreover, firm performance was measured on perception and
not on figures. It was due to the hesitation and resistance which firms showed
for not sharing their financial figures. There are many environmental indicators
of uncertainty but only three indicators were included i.e. market turbulence,
competitive intensity and technological uncertainty
Sample size
A pilot study was conducted in which 10 owners of SME firms were asked
to fill a small questionnaire consisted of 16 items of entrepreneurial marketing.
It was done to see whether what percentage of firms is adopting this innovative
technique. The sample unit was marketing managers, owners/CEO working in
Family SMEs who are directly involved in marketing functions. To identify the
Family SMES, it is important to understand Family SMES of this region first.
SMES sector in south Asia has more severe issues than developed parts of the
world. There are around 3.2 million business enterprises in Pakistan. The firms
who have 99 or less employees contribute up to 90% of all private enterprises
working in the industrial sector. The importance of the sector was not realized
before and their contribution was wrongly interpreted. Generally the sector is
not planned and organized, and the uncertain environmental conditions and
problems created many barriers. It also affected its competitiveness and has
also not let them to flourish. In different countries, there are different
definitions given for Family SMES because of their diverse structure and
nature but our study followed the definition given by SMESDA (2007) which
is based on number of employees i.e. less than 250 and been also used in
previous studies.
Survey instrument
For the accomplishment of this purpose a structured close ended and self-
administered questionnaire is used for collection of data. Questionnaire was
divided into two sections. Section one contains demographics of the
respondents. Section two contains scale items. The scale consists of 42 items,
16 items for entrepreneurial marketing (Fiore, et al. 2013), 9 for firm
performance (Li, et al. 2009) where the subjective measures were used to get
the response about profit, efficiency and growth as performance measures, 17
for environmental uncertainty with the distribution of 6 for market turbulence,

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6 for competitive intensity and 5 items for technological uncertainty (Jaworski

& Kohli, 1993). A five point Likert scale is used to record the responses (“1”
for Strongly Disagree & “5” for Strongly Agree for all the three variables).
Results
Out of the 250 questionnaires used for total data collection, 225 were
received while 25 were not responded. From those 225 questionnaires, 189
were workable for further process. 36 questionnaires were not included because
some had more missing items, inappropriate responded and dual marked at
many items. The total response rate was 84%.
Table 1 Reliability of Questionnaire
Variable Cronbach’s Alpha No of Items
Entrepreneurial Marketing 0.843 16
Firm Performance 0.795 9
Environmental Uncertainty 0.709 17
Overall Reliability 0.865 42
Regression analysis summary for EM predicting FP (N=189)
IV DV B Std. Error T Sig.
EM FP 0.85 0.054 15.68 0
Note: R2 = .568; R2Adjusted = .566; F (1,187) = 246.159; p < .05.
Results show that the regression line moderately fitted the data, with the
value of 0.56. The results demonstrate that one percent change in
entrepreneurial marketing will cause 0.75 unit variation in firm performance.
Significance of beta is evaluated on the value of t-statistics. The value of t
above 2 proves β to be significant. Here the value of t-stat for explanatory
variable is 15.68, both variables have direct relation. In our study significance
of variable is less than 0.05. Hence, hypothesis is accepted.
To check whether environmental uncertainty moderates the relationship
between entrepreneurial marketing and firm performance we did the following
test by taking M1 as interaction term.

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Table 2 Regression Analysis for EM and M1 Predicting FP

Model IV DV B Std. Error T Sig.
1 EM FP 0.85 0.054 15.689 0
2 EU FP 0.833 0.056 14.816 0
M1 FP -0.029 0.026 -1.119 0.265
2 2
Note: 1: R = .568; R Adjusted = .566; F (1,187) = 246.159; p < .05.
2: R2 = .571; R2Adjusted = .567; F (1,186) = 1.252; p >.05.
The value of R-Square is 0.756, which shows that the selected independent
variable explains 75% of dependent variable. The beta value of moderator is -
0.29 and insignificant. So the subject hypothesis will be rejected resulting
environmental uncertainty does not moderate the relationship between
entrepreneurial marketing and firm’s performance.
Discussion
The purpose of the research was to study the impact of entrepreneurial
marketing on firm’s performance and the moderating effect of environmental
uncertainty. Two hypotheses were made and tested. The first hypothesis is
tested through simple regression. As per results, entrepreneurial marketing
adopted in any firms will enhance the firm’s performance. The study conducted
on entrepreneurial marketing and its impact on SMES performance by
Hempenius (2012) also found that entrepreneurial marketing is positively
related to firm’s performance. He found that non financial measures are
positively associated to entrepreneurial marketing.
Then we conducted a test to check whether environmental uncertainty
moderates the relationship between entrepreneurial marketing and firm’s
performance. The moderator variable was environmental uncertainty. The
result suggests that the moderator has no impact on their relationship as the
result shows that moderator is insignificant. The reason for this result is the
dynamic role of entrepreneurial marketing which encounters all the elements of
uncertainty. For example if opportunities are not available in the market then
entrepreneurs being pro-active, search for opportunities in other markets.
Similarly every dimension covers the uncertain elements and helps the firm to
earn profits. As the research conducted by Hempenius (2012), also suggested
these results. No matter what kind of industry or market does the firm operates
in; if it engages itself into entrepreneurial marketing then the performance will
be better than its competitors. The customer and technological uncertainty are
however of no impact on the benefits of entrepreneurial marketing. It means
that firms working in technological and customer uncertain environments can
reap the benefits of entrepreneurial marketing. Firms that use entrepreneurial

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marketing will outperform their competitors on both non-financial and

financial terms.
Conclusion
In summary, entrepreneurial marketing is really important for enhancing
the firm’s performance. Our study shows the importance of entrepreneurial
marketing and its effectiveness. The findings suggest that even with the
prevailing environmental uncertainty (customer turbulence, competitive
intensity and technological uncertainty) the advantages of entrepreneurial
marketing will be achieved. The reason is that the dimensions of
entrepreneurial marketing counter all the uncertain aspects (taken in this study)
in the market. It appears that entrepreneurs of Family SMES must keep on
improving their marketing techniques so that they can acquire higher levels of
business performance. All discussed dimensions of entrepreneurial marketing
help the firms to counter the external and internal uncertainty. The
entrepreneurs must involve their firms in entrepreneurial marketing no matter
what the conditions are. Entrepreneurial marketing techniques help the firms to
distinguish themselves from their competitors. Marketing is the stand out
feature which makes a firm successful. A unique phenomenon has been
observed that mostly people were not having a formal education of marketing
still they almost knew everything about it.
When an entrepreneur wants to start a business of his/her own, he must be
entrepreneurial in his approach. He must focus on his marketing methods,
approaches and tactics. The context and characteristics of SMES can be best
suited to entrepreneurial marketing. Entrepreneurial marketing practices and
theory are best known for small and medium firms but it can also be seen in
larger organizations. A fifth P, as mentioned by Stokes (2000) is passion which
is really important in entrepreneur’s behavior for conducting day to day
business and working of the firm. This passion will help entrepreneur to work
hard and achieve desired performances.
Entrepreneurial marketing almost covers every aspect required to conduct
marketing operations in small and medium enterprises. Entrepreneurial
marketing can be conceptualized as a marketing technique that is more
innovative, opportunity focused, more risk taking and can be operated without
the resources been in control. If the firms will not put focus on their marketing
practices then this will turn things against them and all the good work started
will end up in nothing.

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 Irfan et al.

Future research
In future, other environmental variables can be taken into consideration
like suppliers, government policies, rules and regulations to figure out if they
have any significant impact on the relationship of entrepreneurial marketing
and firm’s performance. Entrepreneurial marketing’s impact can also be
studied on other performance measures/dimensions, both financial measures
like return on equity and non-financial like customer loyalty, customer
retention. A combination of these two can also be tested to analyze firm’s
performance. It is suggested by the literature that it’s becoming very important
to analyze a combination of financial and non-financial measures. Different
industries should be researched to check the reliability and validity of the
results found in this study. This study is based on subjective measures so the
future research should be done on financial figures and analyses (factual data)
which mean more objectivity should be involved. More comprehensive and
exact results will be obtained by adding more objectivity. As the literature
suggested that entrepreneurial marketing is not restricted to Family SMES so
studies can be conducted in larger organizations to compare the results and see
whether entrepreneurial marketing has the same impact on firm’s performance
or not in both type of organizations.

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