ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the role and relevance model of marketing in small-and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs). The role and relevance model of marketing aims to explain how and why SMEs approach the action of marketing the way they do. The role of marketing examines the level of marketing activity in an organization. At a basic level, this could be a job title such as marketing officer or as part of a list of duties undertaken by an individual or team such as an account manager or sales force. On a recent site visit to a Lincoln-based agricultural SME, we were taken to the sales office. En route, we passed a door with a sign saying ‘Marketing Department’. Does this tell us anything about the nature of the marketing activity in the company? Probably not very much, but it is a start and we can assume that there is some level of marketing activity going on. The role of marketing in SMEs can be hidden; it is quite likely that an SME will not be so formally structured and marketing activities may be employed in a rather more organic fashion. In a second company visit, the finance director of a construction company explained that everyone in the company could handle most of the jobs. It would not be unusual for the production manager to make sales calls to clients. A third example is a transport company, who often say that their best marketing people are their drivers. It is the drivers who sit in the cafés and talk to other drivers and they often discuss which haulage load is going where and who is the end customer. This information is fed back to the office in an unstructured ad hoc way, but is in fact a form of market research and does lead to new business being found. Nobody at the company has the job title of ‘marketing manager’, but it is clear that marketing is a key activity in the company.
