A commentary on current research at the marketing and entrepreneurship interface

Office Depot’s generous support of the Journal of Small Business Management’s Small Business Research Forum and special issue on marketing and entrepreneurship has resulted in a series of excellent paper presentations from which this special issue was developed. The two papers that we had the pleasure to work with, and in one case actually present for the authors, were “Brand Management in Small to Medium-Sized Enterprise,” by Pierre Berthon, Michael T. Ewing, and Julie Napoli and “Understanding Market- Driving Behavior: The Role of Entrepreneurship,” by Minet Schindehutte, Mike Morris, and Akin Kocak. We will discuss each paper in terms of what makes the paper important to scholars who work at the marketing and entrepreneurship interface, potential extensions, and the common theoretical domain that both papers converge upon. Brand Management in Small to Medium-Sized Enterprises This paper is an extension of the Ewing and Napoli (2005) brand orientation scale for not-for profits applied to a for-profit small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) context. Berthon, Ewing, and Napoli (2006) contribute greatly to our understanding of the value of an intangible asset (the brand) in the ability of an SME to leverage marketing capabilities to build competitive advantage. The authors propose that brand management practices (BMPs) are performance drivers and those BMPs can be used to help "differentiate highversus low-performing" SMEs and large organizations (Berthon, Ewing, and Napoli 2006). BMP metrics were derived from Keller’s (2000) brand report card and together on the important question of developing an understanding of the interrelationship between marketing and entrepreneurship in the SME context. We hope that this issue will stimulate further empirical and conceptual research at the marketing/entrepreneurship interface that is both managerially useful and academically constructive.