Content area
Full Text
Malcolm Robert Victor Goodman: Malcolm Robert Victor Goodman is Lecturer in Marketing at Durham University Business School, Durham, UK
Operating in reality or virtual reality?
Hardly a day seems to pass when the local and national news media do not record the woes of hard-pressed businesses. As the Millennium approaches many firms are battling for profitable custom in markets that are characterised by discontinuous change (Handy, 1994; Goodman, 1995) and escalating competition. This paper offers a positive example of how small firms can respond proactively in difficult business conditions by using some qualitative research techniques to identify opportunities for positively differentiating their activities without putting unacceptable pressure on their budgets.
Whilst many may not fully understand the reason for their predicament (Levitt, 1960), most businesses are acutely aware of the problem of winning new and keeping existing customers. Just how this can be done is the critical question. Simply speaking the choice is stark: manage change or change the management practice. The very nature of small businesses and their owner managers makes the latter choice difficult. Generally speaking they are not renowned for their ability to comprehend and address their position from a marketing perspective; know what questions to ask; who to put them to; or be able to afford professional market research (Carson, 1995).
This conflict between professionalism and instinct ("generalist" versus "seat of the pants direction") is of key importance to the development and function of the marketing/ entrepreneurship interface in small business management (Hills and LaForge, 1992). Considerable attention has been directed over the last decade to ways in which organisations can adopt the marketing concept in their business operations. The marketing orientation paradigm, as described, for example, by Kohli and Jaworski (1990) and Narver and Slater (1990), is a holistic approach that has provided a focus for recent conceptual and empirical studies. These have included the extent to which firms can realise such an orientation; the association of market orientation with company performance; and the methods that organisations have adopted (Greenley, 1987). This article contributes to the literature by describing how three small Bedfordshire businesses successfully networked to sponsor an experiment in the application of some basic qualitative market research approaches to their common problem of identifying customer value perceptions. Early...