Assessment of marketing challenges of new ventures: A Study on Micro and Small-scale Enterprises (MSEs) in Dawro Zone

Abstract

The central theme of this study was assessing marketing challenges of new ventures in MSE business in Dawro Zone through measuring internal and external marketing factors inter alia with venture performance. The study was executed using survey design in discerning the relationship between marketing factors on business performance. From total 526 ventures 222 were drawn as sample through the multi-stage sampling. Amharic version Likert-scaled questionnaire that was pilot tested for which Cronbach’s α found to be 0. 812 for reliability employed for data collection using field interviewer thus, 201 (90.54% response rate) complete questionnaire booklets were returned. Semi-structured interview was conducted with 18 officials and expertise as key informants whose information was analyzed content wise for narrations. Furthermore, official documents from government offices as well as enterprises own documents have been consulted for secondary data. Using SPSS V.20, analysis ranging from simple descriptive statistics to parametric inferential statistical measures as student’s t-test distribution for single sample and Pearson’s coefficient for bivariate relationship was used for hypothesis testing. The survey pointed out that mean performance score for aggregate performance indicators was 2.70 with the δ 0.814 as self-appraised by respondents. This has been resulted from mediocre inside market orientation and marketing capabilities; and weak outside institutional support as explained by statistically significant mean scores of less than 1.85, 1.80, and 1.65 with 97.5% confidence interval. Among the challenges identified infrastructural problems mainly road and transportation stood ahead of others for upsetting the venture performance which was supported by low mean rating score of below 1.84 for the favorableness of business context with 97.5% confidence interval. The bivariate Pearson’s correlation coefficient between marketing factors indicated the existence of positive significant associations ranging from sizable (0.575 for marketing supports) to strong (0.707 for market orientation) at 99% level of confidence. Adhering to the survey findings it is advisable to establish in-house marketing strength was the first step in attaining better performance and it is expected from every partner in sector, either participant or promoter.