An innovative tool to assess marketing capabilities of traditional producers within the European food industry

The purpose of this paper is to assess the marketing management capabilities of SMEs producing traditional food products in EU throughout the development of a benchmarking tool. SMEs represent the greater part of European food firms and they find it very difficult to adapt to market changes, and to compete with big enterprises. In this context, marketing management plays a key role in good SMEs performances in the market. The benchmarking tool, utilised to assess marketing capabilities, is aimed at improving critical points in the marketing area of traditional food firms by following the example of the best ones. This method is developed in the innovative form of an interactive questionnaire published on the Web. At the moment the sample is composed by 60 firms located in three member states (Belgium, Italy, and Hungary) producing traditional food products belonging to five sectors (cheese, beer, dry ham, sausage and white pepper). The data were analysed with cluster analysis. Results show that the majority of firms is weak in marketing research, and also the marketing strategy is not well developed. On the other hand, stronger performance is shown in innovation. Related to the size and production, generally, micro sized firms perform worse than small and medium enterprises, and the production of PDO-PGI products affects positively the marketing capabilities.