The effect of entrepreneurial marketing on firm performance

Increasing market uncertainty renders traditional marketing efforts less efficient and effective in enhancing firm performance. In today’s ever-changing, chaotic, and unsettled environments, with continuously increasing competition and increasingly diminishing returns to current market offerings, businesses are constantly on the lookout for new market opportunities. Overall, firms are under an increasing burden to be more vigilant, innovative, proactive, risk-tolerant, and agile than ever as they develop and carry out marketing strategies. This dissertation introduces a robust scale for measuring entrepreneurial marketing (EM) as a distinct construct and demonstrates its discriminant validity from the overlapping notions of market orientation (MO) and entrepreneurial orientation (EO). Empirical findings also demonstrate that the positive and significant impact of EM on firm performance becomes even more pronounced under highly uncertain environmental conditions. Additionally, this research finds EM to partially mediate the well-established positive relationships between MO, EO, and firm performance. It reviews the evolution of the domain and conceptualization of EM and synthesizes the literature that is emerging from the marketing-entrepreneurship interface on this fertile research stream. The interrelationships between EM, MO, EO, firm performance, and the moderating effect of network structure (i.e., size, diversity, and strength), environmental variables (i.e., market turbulence, technological turbulence, competitive intensity, supplier power, and market growth), and firm size are examined through several hypotheses. To test the hypotheses articulated by this research, I employed structural equation modeling (SEM) to analyze survey results from 450 U.S. based firms representing a broad spectrum of industries and firm sizes, using a stratified sampling technique. Overall, the analyses provide compelling evidence that EM is a distinct construct that has a positive influence on firm performance, and that it partially mediates the positive effects of MO and EO on firm performance. This dissertation also demonstrates that while the EM-performance relationship is positively moderated by market turbulence, competitive intensity, and supplier power, it is negatively moderated by market growth and network strength. It also finds an inverted U-shaped relationship between the performance efficacy of EM and firm size. Managerial implications, limitations, and future research are also discussed.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference