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This chapter presents the e-marketing practices followed by the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in India. It explored the owner-managers perceptions of MSMEs regarding their average expenditures, budget allocations, management, policy, sources of information, return on investment and their desire for formal training on e-marketing activities in future. Data were collected from 253 MSME owner-managers through an e-questionnaire. The researchers found that the majority of the MSME owner-managers allocate a monthly budget for e-marketing initiatives, and they have increased it over the past few years. However, the total expenditure on e-marketing activities is between 1% and 10% of their total marketing budget. These businesses are partly or fully outsourcing search engine optimization (SEO), display advertising and referral marketing, whereas other e-marketing activities are managed in-house. Generally, these MSMEs are not measuring the success of their digital marketing efforts. If they do it, they are not doing it in a professional manner. MSMEs were found to be slow in posting content and engaging their followers on social media. Surprisingly, two-third of the MSMEs that participated in this study did not show any desire to pursue courses in digital marketing. In conclusion, this study puts forward key implications to practitioners as well as to the government agencies that are involved in the promotion of information technology among MSMEs.

Companies are increasingly leveraging digital technologies toward innovation strategies that deliver novel features to customers sequentially through successive new product generations (i.e., successive innovation). Extant literature examining successive innovation is both limited and fragmented across marketing and management literatures. Our goal is to synthesize literature on concepts related to successive innovation (such as versioning and upgrades) to identify the core dimensions of successive innovation and provide a cohesive framework to guide future research in this domain.

Given the equivocality in understanding the conceptual domain of successive innovation, we review and synthesize literature across three disciplinary domains: marketing, management, and information and decision sciences. Based on the emerging patterns from the literature review, we develop a conceptual framework of successive innovation with the aim of moving the discussion toward greater theoretical clarity.

Based on the literature review and synthesis, we identify three core-dimensions that define successive innovation and compare these across digital and physical product realms: coexistence, embeddedness, and adoption controllability.

Our proposed conceptual dimensions of successive innovation, and discussion of differences across physical and digital product domains, offer important directions for future research and a common vocabulary.

As physical and digital successive innovations can differ in coexistence, embeddedness, and adoption controllability, firms need to consider relevant barriers to adoption of successive product generations and select appropriate strategies to promote and communicate successive innovation. Our proposed successive innovation conceptual dimensions help managers comprehend the complexity of arranging such innovation in business and consumer segments.

Our contribution to the emerging literature on successive innovation is threefold. First, by conducting a comprehensive literature review, we integrate insights from different fields of inquiry (i.e., marketing, management, and information and decision sciences). Second, based on the synthesis of the literature, we offer a conceptual framework of successive innovation, which aims to move the discussion toward greater theoretical clarity. Third, based on our review and conceptual framework, we discuss a set of future research directions to guide academic research efforts.

Introduction: Sustainability and Industry 4.0 have recently influenced the global economy. With the Industrial Revolution 4.0, there has been a significant focus on digital sustainability in enterprises. Micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) are the most vulnerable sections regarding new transformations.

Purpose: Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, when all businesses had no option other than to adopt digitisation, MSMEs faced tremendous issues to make this shift. Despite the immense focus on digital sustainability, some deterrents exist to its adoption in MSMEs. Contemporary research focuses on determining the critical deterrents to digital sustainability in MSMEs.

Methodology: This chapter employs the interpretive structural modelling technique, and Matrice impacts Croises Multiplication Appliqué a classement (MICMAC) analysis to identify and further classify the deterrents to digital sustainability in MSMEs.

Findings: Legal barriers and firms’ economic conditions are identified as the major deterrents. Eliminating these deterrents would help minimise the minor ones too. To deliver global sustainability goals, digital sustainability must be duly adopted everywhere.

The concept of information and communication technology (ICT) has extensively used among travel and hospitality organization in the contemporary world. The present study discovers tourism and hospitality business reactions toward ICT-based marketing usage and investigates its relationship with functional competencies and profitability among tourism and hospitality business organizations in India. With a quantitative approach, the study found an extensive usage of ICT-based marketing in tourism and hospitality organizations was noted from descriptive tables. The application of regression analysis indicated positive and significant impact of ICT-based marketing on functional competencies and profitability of tourism and hospitality organizations in India. A positive and significant correlation was also noted among these two due to adoption of ICT-based marketing. This study provides insights to formulate comprehensive ICT-based marketing strategies to fulfill growing customer needs.

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) involved in the production of natural essential oils can reduce market accessibility challenges by trading through electronic marketplaces (e-marketplaces). However, trust is a barrier that SMEs should overcome in order to successfully trade in e-marketplaces. The agricultural sector presents a unique challenge to the subject of trust and e-marketplaces. It is difficult for SMEs in the agricultural sector to provide the level of assurance of product quality that their buyers expect. Trust between buyers and sellers during the earliest stages of e-marketplace interaction can pave the way for future trust in a seller on an e-marketplace. Thus, this study uses the uncertainty reduction theory (URT) to investigate factors that could influence the initial trust and pave the way for future trust in a seller on e-marketplaces. This study assumes a qualitative research methodology in which a multiple-case study approach is adopted. The study focuses on SMEs that produce natural essential oils in South Africa. Open-ended interviews were conducted with companies involved in buying or selling natural essential oils in South Africa to determine the factors that influence their decision to buy or sell in an e-marketplace. Findings from data were used to inform the development of a model of trust in sellers of natural essential oils in e-marketplaces. The proposed model recommends trust factors that should be considered during the entry, personal, and exit phases of the URT. The model identifies common and unique trust factors that relate specifically to businesses trading natural essential oils on e-marketplaces. The study found that some SMEs face challenges in coming up with an effective model for selling agricultural produce on e-marketplaces. Hence, they often resort to face-to-face interaction when it comes to product inspection, especially when dealing with first-time buyers. However, this study presented measures put in place by other SMEs suggesting how such challenges could be addressed. Nevertheless, a lack of trust in technology remains a cause for concern to some SMEs selling natural essential oils.

Purpose: The prominence of entrepreneurial marketing (EM) as the practice of exploiting market opportunities is becoming increasingly important to Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). It has been stated that SMEs lack resources such as finance, knowledge, experience, and information, compared with larger firms that integrate marketing with innovativeness, which is critical to enhancing entrepreneurship. Therefore, this chapter aims at establishing the theoretical foundation that links entrepreneurial orientation with marketing practices in Jordanian SMEs. More specifically, this chapter provides deep recognition of the current status of EM opportunities and challenges in Jordanian SMEs.

Design/methodology/approach: As SMEs are one of the important components in the private sector in Jordan and contribute to the creation of almost half of the GDP. Accordingly, this chapter adopts a critical review of the relevant literature, governmental reports, business studies, and published surveys in EM among Jordanian SMEs. Moreover, this chapter will present a thorough analysis of the published statistics and insights about EM orientations from different sectors of Jordanian SMEs. Based on the reviewed and analyzed secondary data, EM initiatives, opportunities, and challenges can be extracted and highlighted to achieve the purpose of this chapter.

Findings: The expected outcomes of the chapter are to build the theoretical foundation and promote a deep understanding that bridges the knowledge gap about the status of EM in Jordanian SMEs supported by literature and published report evidence. Another outcome of this chapter is highlighting the important entrepreneurial issues and identifying areas for further research in the Middle East generally and Jordan particularly.

Practical implications: The chapter provides relevant knowledge, literature-based evidence, and lessons learned to empower entrepreneurs in SMEs. This chapter also enhances the best practices of EM for entrepreneurs, marketers, and policymakers. Moreover, this chapter proposes how to overcome potential challenges and threats that may be encountered by practitioners, especially in different cultural contexts such as the Middle East and North African (MENA) region.

Originality/value: The chapter proposed a conceptual foundation about EM in SMEs aimed at different cultural contexts like Jordan. Moreover, the chapter provides a critical review of published research that explains entrepreneurs aspirations for growth, expansion, and innovation, which is critical for the growth and sustainability of SMEs. Finally, the chapter concludes by providing policy implications and practical recommendations that can encourage policymakers in formulating and implementing the relevant interventions and strategic trends for enhancing entrepreneurship in Jordan.

This chapter contributes to the ongoing debate about how digitalisation affects the internationalisation of small- and medium-sized firms (SMEs). By applying the Uppsala Internationalisation Process model, this chapter examines the impact of e-commerce on the internationalisation of SMEs. The study uses a unique dataset, which includes 14,513 SMEs across several sectors in 34 countries. The results show that firms using the Internet as a means to provide information about the firm exhibit a higher degree of internationalisation, while using the Internet to facilitate transactions was found to have a positive impact on the ratio of foreign sales to the total sales; however, these foreign sales are likely to be concentrated in less regions/markets. Furthermore, perceived export barriers were found to be a significant moderator of the effects of e-commerce usage on international intensity and international diversification. This suggests that e-commerce does not automatically facilitate the internationalisation of SMEs.

In this chapter, the authors undertake a systematic review of the literature to identify research exploring the use of new information and communication technologies (ICT). New ICT include the use of the Internet, mobile communications, and social technologies. The authors find that while interest in the area is increasing, especially among marketing and information systems scholars, there seems to be far less research interest among international business (IB) and strategy scholars. This chapter provides a summary of the research that has been done and discusses some potential future research areas that IB and strategy researchers might wish to pursue. Among these projects are investigating the use of ICT as a tool to aid the internationalization process, improve location choice and entry mode decisions, and identify and create a sustainable competitive advantage. The use of ICT in business is pervasive; As research scholars, we need to build these technologies into our theories and research to help managers determine what works and where certain technologies can help create better performing firms.