Marketing Capabilities in SMES of Pakistan: An Empirical Approach

Abstract

The role of marketing capabilities in driving superior firm performance has long been of interest of marketing scholars. This study initiated to discover the relationship of marketing capabilities with firm performance in the SMEs of Pakistan. The survey questionnaire was adopted from the previous researches. The initial data was collected from 36 owners/managers of the SMEs firms in Karachi, Pakistan for pilot testing. All assumptions were authenticated before applied multiple regression to find the variance in firm performance by applying (six) marketing capabilities variables. The findings of the multiple regression suggested that marketing research, pricing, service development, distribution, communication, and marketing management can account for 30.8 percent of the variance in firm performance. It was also confirmed that pricing, distribution, and communication are positively significant with firm performance, while marketing research, service development, and marketing management linked non significant with firm performance.

Keywords: marketing capabilities, pricing, service development, firm performance, SME

JEL Classification: D78, L11, L14, M1, M31