European traditional food producers and marketing capabilities : an application of marketing management process

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the marketing management capabilities of SMEs producing traditional food products in order to analyse the market orientation of the SMEs in the food industry. Following the theoretical approach of Market Orientation, our analysis is based on an assessment of marketing management process. The methodology refers to a survey developed through a questionnaire published on the web and a sample of 371 firms, coming from Belgium, Italy, Spain, Czech Republic, and Hungary was used in the analysis. Cluster analysis was applied to find different levels of market orientation of the firms. The results revealed a certain lack of appropriate skills in marketing management in the firms of the sample, confirming the evidence found in the economic literature concerning SMEs. Nevertheless, cluster analysis outlined a group of firms with good marketing capabilities and market oriented, which represents a great part of the sample (40%). With regard to the stages of the marketing management process, the most problematic are those of planning and implementation, and control and evaluation, highlighting the difficulties for SMEs encounter in carrying out coordinated marketing; which appears to be generally characterised by poor organisational capacity.