The Impact of Strategic Marketing on the Innovation Performance of Organizations : A Study with Respect to Indian Micro Small and Medium Manufacturing Organizations

Abstract

Strategic Marketing is very essential to realize firm’s objectives and thereby take the advantage against the competitors. Innovation becomes the means of taking the firm to the higher level among the existing local and global competitors. Strategic Marketing (SM) is making the firm do well where as Innovation is still enhancing the firms capability of doing things better and it happens to be the need of the hour. Thus Strategic Marketing and Innovation becomes the important components that need to be adopted by any organizations. It becomes essential to analyze the importance of Strategic Marketing for realizing the firm’s innovativeness and there by achieve the higher growth. This research is an attempt to find how Strategic Marketing is affecting the organizations performance by adopting innovation. The literature review gives a clear indication to do the research with reference to our Indian MSME’s. Considering this, the following specific objectives were formulated for the research. • Building the measures of Strategic Marketing and Innovation and develop a conceptual research framework for examining the relationship between them. • Designing a measuring instrument using Strategic Marketing and Innovation measures and test the instrument. • Examine the relationship between Strategic Marketing and Innovation and also its impact on each. • Examine the effect of different dimensions of Innovation on Strategic Marketing dimensions and find which of these needs more thrust in an organization. • Make appropriate suggestions on the need for adoption of SM as a means for any Indian manufacturing organizations to achieve a higher growth rate. The constructs of Strategic Marketing and Innovation are identified for further study. A conceptual framework was formulated with the set of hypothesis which needs to be tested. A structured questionnaire based on likert scale is used for collecting the primary data. The manufacturing organizations falling under Micro, Small and Medium scale are taken for the study through the directory provided by MSME Development Institute of India, Bangalore. The data was collected by approaching the managers of the manufacturing firms who have responsibilities to exhibit different management roles. The purpose of collecting the primary data is to know the management’s view regarding Strategic marketing and Innovation related to their firm. Our work includes both pilot and main study, where in validity and reliability of the measuring instrument is tested during pilot study. In our main study, 150 manufacturing organizations were approached situated in Peenya and Rajajinagar, Bangalore urban region. We got around 91 responses yielding about 60.6 % response rate. The data was obtained from 91 organizations, consisting of 04 Micro, 38 small and 49 medium scale organizations. A detailed statistical analysis is done for the collected data. Highly loading factors for the collected data was found out using confirmatory factor analysis and followed by finding the summated score of the data for the further analysis. The main study data was analyzed using multiple regression method by considering Strategic Marketing(SM) constructs as independent variables and Innovation performance constructs as dependent variables. The different assumptions underlying multiple regression were verified and five regression models estimated. The overall model fit was assessed and hypothesis was tested. The relationship established between SM and Innovation performance clearly indicates that SM has a great impact on the innovation performance of an organization irrespective of whatever may be the type of innovation. Hence achieving of SM performance can lead to the achievement of innovation performance also within organizations. Further the significant variables were identified from the individual regression models, interpreted and the models validated. It was found that out of the four variables of SM considered, as many as three variables viz. Marketing mix, Brand positioning and Entrepreneurial management are having a significant impact in one way or other way on the overall innovation performance of the organization. The strategy of focusing on the identified significant variables of SM was suggested for improving the innovation performance within organizations.