According to Van Scheers (2011) and Gabrielli and Balboni (2010), marketing is one of the most important activities for SME success. SEDA (2012) assert that the South African SMEs face high levels of failure rate, which lack of marketing skills makes a huge contribution. Cant (2012) indicates that the absence of marketing skills has a bad effect on the success of SMEs.
Market knowledge is essential since it helps SMEs in identifying the prospective competitors in the market (Marjanova & Stojanovaski 2012). Furthermore, Marjanova and Stojanovaski (2012) state that SMEs owners are not knowledgeable in running the business and have no thorough understanding of the marketing practices and its impact to business success in a market economy. All these facts make the enterprise vulnerable in the market competition. Ebitu et al. (2015) recommends that SMEs managers should be effectively educated on the principles of marketing and on marketing practices. The SMEs marketing strategy aims to position resources and abilities to face competition in the market; it is reported that resources are an essential part in implementing the strategies; hence, SMEs do not have enough (Ardjouman & Asma 2015).
According to SAICA (2015), finding customers and marketing the business well are the biggest operational obstacles that SMEs come across. Many SMEs do not exercise the marketing model, which acknowledge the power of the customer and guarantees customer satisfaction.
Market knowledge assists SMEs to cultivate a competitive advantage through an understanding of customer demand and knowledge, which results in positioning itself
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in a strong market position (Hadiyati 2015). Most SMEs have limited resources assigned for marketing and managers are inexperienced in marketing and focus on the activities they are familiar with, which leads to little engagement of marketing by SMEs (Carter & Jones-Evans 2012). A great deficiency in SMEs marketing is incompetence to forecast future product demands, where it results in a slow and passive response to restructurings and developments within the marketing environments (Jovanov & Conevska 2011).
Bellamy (2009) in Lekhanya (2010) assert that there is a great need for SMEs marketing managers to properly plan as they operate under unsettled environment. According to Sarma (2013) and Hadiyati (2015) SMEs are faces a fundamental marketing challenge to succeed and the foremost challenges SMEs face are product and market competitions and access to market information in support of marketing. Venkatesh and Kumar (2015) asserts that SMEs do not have enough resources in place therefore, there is a need for government support to make contribution in the area of marketing. Omar and Anas (2014) state that SMEs need both financial and non-financial support programs to make improvements in marketing, through partnering with big firms in exploiting all marketing opportunities.
SMEs owners implement the marketing concept differently to traditional marketing. Marketing concepts has remained the concept for discussion in many textbooks. This concept that was initially developed for bigger firms cannot be used without alterations or adaptations for SMEs. It shows that the approach of the marketing concept necessitates some adjustments to match with the SMEs characteristics as opposed to big firms (Sarma, Septiani, Dewi & Siregar 2013). According Omar and Anas (2014) and Leboea (2017), challenges in the SME market and marketing are experienced because of factors such as quality of goods (most produced goods are of lesser quality), inferior raw materials, unattractive product designs and lower level of workers’ skills and expertise, therefore, to some extent the success of SMEs is influenced by ineffective marketing elements.
Enough revenue cannot be generated by selling out-fashioned products to the very same market in the same old way (Trivedi 2013). According to Ventatesh and Kumari (2015), marketing serves as a strategic instrument for business enhancement and has an effect on the growth and existence of the business. As a result of lack of resources,
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lack of information and disorganised ways of marketing, the SME sector continuously faces problems in exploring fresh markets and keeping the old ones.
Awan and Hashmi (2014) state that marketing is informal and unstructured within the SMEs. According to Fischer, Nebe and Klompmaker (2011), marketing is a discipline that helps in delivering business-oriented market strategies that will enable it to meet customers at the point of their needs and surpass customers’ expectations. Chuwiruch, Jhundra-Indra and Boonlua (2012) asserts that for the firm to successfully compete and become sustainable with all the high level of environmental changes and uncertainty, it is vital to develop new practices and strategies to appeal to the great masses of customers and retain competitive advantage. The victory of business is based on its capability to satisfy customer needs, it is done through adopting relevant marketing strategies and improvement in communication technologies (Li & Zhou 2010; Voronkova, Kurochkina, Firova & Bikezina 2017).
SMEs product and brand failures transpire on a continuing basis to varying degrees; this negatively affect the development and the product marketing processes (Berry 2010). It is a common issue that businesses and products that are not adequately marketed are likely to perform poorly (Tlhomola, Rankhumise & van Niekerk 2010). Therefore, it is important for SMEs to improve on the way they market their product and services.
The current and upcoming prospective businesses and product growth depend much on the marketing activities (Paull & Duarte 2010). Most SME owners are seriously constrained as they are unable to invest much in marketing and lack the essential marketing skills (International Monetary Fund 2013). According to January (2013), SMEs marketing is ordinarily disregarded, and this can be ascribed to motives such as shortage of funding for market researches for specific product and services, lack of exposure about the significance of corporate marketing training and lack of self- confidence to explore different market opportunities.
The research conducted by Xaba (2012) shows that some SMEs success depends on sales and marketing, therefore, without sales and marketing the business cannot guarantee a future patronage. Xaba (2012) further state that SMEs needs to engage on marketing and promotional works to ensure that clients are aware of their business, product and service existence.
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