BUSINESS GROWTH AND MARKETING MANAGEMENT PRACTICES AMONGST MANUFACTURING SMEs FROM AUSTRALIA’S BUSINESS LONGITUDINAL SURVEY

The principal objectives in this paper are to compare and contrast marketing management practices for a longitudinal sample of 871 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Australian manufacturing sector that have embarked upon different development pathways; and to examine possible connections between SME growth and the choice of marketing management practices. The results indicate that the marketing management practices that appear to have a strong positive relationship with growth are: a product orientation, use of budget (sales) forecasting, use of formal strategic or business plans, performance comparisons with other businesses and use of formal networking. The findings generally do not support prescribing the marketing concept as it applies to large companies but do tend to support Carson and Gilmore’s (2000) Situation Specific Marketing concept as it applies to SMEs. The findings also tend to suggest that, in the SME context, network marketing should be incorporated into the traditional marketing paradigm rather than displacing it as part of the relational marketing paradigm.