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The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to opportunities for further research into the marketing practices of small entrepreneurial firms.

This study reviews the academic literature and identifies a gap in the existing research. It proposes the use of social practice theory in researching entrepreneurial marketing.

Entrepreneurship and marketing have a lot in common – especially in small firms (small to medium-sized enterprises [SMEs]). When there’s nobody with a dedicated marketing role, then people all over the organization typically do things that contribute to the firm’s marketing effort. And, when marketing becomes the sum of activities carried out by different individuals at different levels within the SME, it becomes “an all-pervasive way of doing business”, rather like entrepreneurship, in fact.

This study provides a conceptual overview of the benefits of applying social practice theory to the study of entrepreneurial marketing.

This study shows how social practice theory can be applied to the study of entrepreneurial marketing practices.

This study explains how these marketing practices can be conceptualized to provide insights into the significance of marketing-related activities in small firms.

This study has the potential to facilitate the development of a new marketing research stream based on social practice theory.

Digital technologies, digitalised consumers and the torrent of customer data have been transforming marketing practice. In discussing such trends, existing research has either focussed on the skills marketers need or broad-based approaches such as agile methods but has given less consideration to just how such skills or approaches might be developed and used in marketers' day-to-day activities and in the organisation of marketing in the firm. This is what the authors address in this paper.

This paper adopts an in-depth case study approach to examine an exemplary digital enterprise in transformation of their digital marketing. The insights were gathered from 25 interviews, netnography and document analysis of the case organisation in addition to 10 interviews with independent experts.

Drawing on practice-oriented approach, the authors show how organisations respond to the emerging trends of digital consumers and big data by taking a ‘hacking marketing’ approach and developing novel marketing expertise at disciplinary boundaries. The authors put forward three sets of practices that enable and shape the hacking marketing approach. These include spanning the expertise boundary, making value measurable and experimenting through which their adaptive, iterative and multidisciplinary work occurs. This explains how managing digital consumers and big data is not within the realm of information technology (IT) functions but marketing and how marketing professionals are changing their practice and moving their disciplinary boundaries.

This study offers practical contributions for firms in terms of identifying new work practices and expertise that marketing specialists need in managing digital platforms, digitalised consumers and big data. This study’s results show that enterprises need to design and implement strong training programmes to prepare their marketing workforce in adopting experimentations of agile approach and data-driven decision making. In addition, Marketing education should be changed so that programmes consider a review of their courses and include the novel marketing models and approaches into their curriculum.

This study contributes to the nascent discussions by unpacking how enterprises can develop new marketing expertise and practices beyond skillsets and how such practices form new hacking marketing approach which addresses the problem of the inability of the conventional marketing approach to show its value within the firm.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the dynamics of marketing practice and theory in arguing that much of the dislocation between strategy and practice is due to the inheritance and internalisation of often impractical but persistently dominant, tacit Cartesian assumptions.

This paper uses case methodology to examine the marketing theory into practice/marketing practice into theory conundrum and explores: their separation (marketing theory and marketing practice); their flows (context to text to context: theory into practice/practice into theory); their symbiosis (the praxis of marketing); and the dynamic and static (in situ/in aspic) nature of their duality. This work is an exploratory empirical study undertaken in what is a very under-researched area.

In this paper, marketing theory and marketing practice are recognised as occupying different epistemes. The lifeworld of marketing theorising appears as characterised by a relatively homogenous and mostly cognitive world dominated by rationality and empirical rigour. By contrast, the embodied practitioner inhabits a more highly segmented, fragmented, heterogeneous and frequently improvised landscape.

The authors propose that the all-consuming clamour for reliance and relevance of theory to practice dictates that the form, function and philosophy of marketing must be co-created in the practical pragmatism of praxis. Praxis is practice informed by theory and theory informed by practice, a cyclical process of experiential, contextual learning.

The paper appears to be the first to bring together Cartesian thought and the practice-theory divide in B2B marketing theory.

This paper aims to elaborate on the concept of “integrated marketing communication (IMC) practice” and provide an empirical exposition of how integration is enacted in the lifeworlds of marketing practitioners, drawing from the “practice turn” in management studies. Although IMC is a well-known conceptual idea in academia, there is insufficient theorisation of what it means “to do” IMC. Despite broad acceptance for IMC, there has been scant application of available organisational and sociological theories to illuminate actual IMC practices in the field.

The paper introduces practice theory as a lens through which to study and analyse IMC practices. Using qualitative coding and interpretative analysis, the framework was operationalised and applied to a two-year organisational ethnography encompassing IMC planning activities in at a leading Swedish retailer.

Findings demonstrate how practitioners develop explicit and implicit strategies to enact strategic integration. The study conceptualises IMC as a set of interrelated practices, or routinised behaviours, which are repeated and organised by some social or formal rules and conventions. In the ethnographic context of the study, “IMC as practice” is exhibited in the forms of routines, material set-ups, rules and procedures, cultural templates and teleoaffective structures.

The paper proposes a novel set of theoretical and methodological tools that can be used to understand how IMC lives as a set of practices inside organisations. It specifically conceptualises the link between mental and objectified, materialised and routinised activities that has previously been escaping the sphere of theorisation. By creating language and tools to capture hitherto unmodellable phenomena, the paper opens many new avenues for future research.

The literature has traditionally argued that marketing in firms serving consumer markets is, and should be, different from that in firms serving business markets. This research investigates the marketing practices of 279 firms in Canada and New Zealand to examine the relevance of the consumer/B2B dichotomy in the context of a contemporary conceptual framework. The results show that while consumer firms are somewhat more transactional in their approach to the market and B2B firms are more relational, overall patterns of marketing practice are similar across firm type. Theoretical, practical, and research implications are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to propose the application of social practice theory for the investigation of entrepreneurial marketing (EM) practices.

A theoretical gap has been found between scholarly efforts to explain the nature of EM practice and the actual marketing practice or marketing doings of small firms.

The paper covers some of the EM literature and perspectives and examining the notion of “practice” in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME) and entrepreneurship research. Based on an increasing focus on practice in the social theory literature and the contributions of key social theorists, a discussion is framed in terms of how EM practice can be studied through the investigation material and bodily observations and common interpretations.

The paper offers a proposal that the observations of practitioners’ actions and activities and the investigation of common interpretations can be conceptualized to explain the nature of EM practice. It also gives avenues for future research.

The paper suggests that marketing comprises a wide scope of activities or practices and, in the case of a small firm, is all-pervasive. It also suggests that scholars engage in understanding the collective, distributed, situated, ongoing and tacit nature of EM.

The paper provides a fresh conceptual approach about how EM practice can be studied through the investigation material and bodily observations as well as common interpretations.

Despite the importance of marketing to the success of entrepreneurial ventures very few researchers have studied the links with new business performance. The purpose of this paper is to examine a number of marketing practices in relation to the performance of new firms. Furthermore, the study considers the moderating influence of market competitiveness on the marketing practice-performance relationship.

Both postal and web surveys were utilized to collect responses from 128 entrepreneurs in the early stages of business creation. The data were subjected to exploratory and confirmatory factory analyses to establish the marketing practices in new ventures. These results were then subjected to hierarchical regression analysis to study the marketing-performance relationship. Further analysis was conducted to explore the moderation hypotheses.

The results demonstrate that some practices generally associated with marketing – selective distribution, market segmentation and advertising – have limited impact on performance in new ventures. In contrast, other practices such as product/service innovation, market research and service quality and functionality – do help establish competitive advantage. The results suggest that marketing practices associated with “entrepreneurial behaviour” and not “hard” marketing techniques drive new venture success. The results also support the moderation hypotheses confirming that market conditions help explain the role of marketing in new venture success.

The paper offers a new theoretical framework to better understand the marketing-performance relationship in new ventures and offers suggestions as to the specific conditions for effective use of various marketing practices.

This is one of the first attempts to explore the underlying mechanisms that support marketing practices in new ventures. It reveals the hidden dimensions of the marketing-performance relationship and thereby makes a contribution to both the marketing and entrepreneurship literatures.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between US farmers’ adoption of organic farming and direct marketing, both of which are increasingly important practices in the US agricultural and food sector. In addition, the effects of the two practices on farm income are evaluated.

The research uses the Agricultural and Resource Management Survey from the US Department of Agriculture. Farmers’ adoption of the two practices is modeled with a simultaneous linear probability model, which accounts for the possible linkage between the adoption of the two practices in farmers’ decision-making process. Farm income is modeled with a linear regression model, accounting for the possible endogeneity of the adoption of the two practices.

The main finding is that farmers’ adoption of organic farming decreases their probability of adopting direct marketing, whereas the reverse effect is insignificant. In addition, organic farming helps to improve gross farm income, whereas the effect of direct marketing is insignificant.

These results facilitate better coordination among numerous government programs aimed at promoting organic farming or direct marketing in the US.

This paper extends previous literature by specifically accounting for the possible linkage between farmers’ adoption of organic farming and direct marketing, and demonstrates that farmers do not make the decision to adopt one particular practice in isolation.

Describing marketing practices is fundamental to understanding both the scope of marketing practice and the actual value it adds to the organization. This paper aims to clarify the reach of marketing practice and the nature of activities that marketers carry out.

The study uses mixed methods, involving qualitative document analysis, qualitative interviews and a quantitative managerial survey.

The findings reveal consistency in the views of academics and practitioners across the following disaggregated elements of practice: stakeholder and relationship marketing, customer analysis, marketing-mix management/marketing planning, and the centrality of customers. However, when these themes are integrated into broader categories of practice, the activities are parceled and prioritized in different ways by the different data sources.

The findings have implications for how marketing is practiced and taught and for the future research agenda.

This study considers the functional practices within marketing and clarifies the scope of marketing practice.