Entrepreneurial marketing and university education

Throughout the last century, the content of marketing courses has been focused on understanding the practices and processes within large corporations; however, interest in the marketing practices of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and by entrepreneurs has been increasing both in the US and globally. It is now recognized that 99.7 percent of all US employers are classified as small and 90 per cent of these businesses employ fewer than 20 people. Small and medium-sized enterprises contribute 50 per cent of private sector income and 54 percent of the private sector jobs in the US and most of the net new job growth (US SBA, 2004). While employment opportunities have shifted away from traditional large corporations to SMEs, marketing education has not reflected this change. In this chapter we adopt Venkataraman's (1997, p. 123) perspective that entrepreneurship is the nexus of entrepreneurial 'opportunity and enterprising individuals'. This definition of entrepreneurship is broad enough to include individual and organizational venturing, strategic renewal, and social entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurial marketing is explicitly linking Venkataraman's (1997) nexus of entrepreneurial opportunities and individuals with the value-creating, need-satisfying mechanisms of marketing. While entrepreneurial marketing can be applied in any organizational context from a new venture to a large established corporation, we take the position in this chapter that high-growth SMEs have unique resource constraints, marketing processes, and marketing strategy - implementation issues which are the focus of the present study.