Marketing in SMEs: the role of entrepreneurial sensemaking

The article focuses on the role of the entrepreneur in marketing within small and medium-sized enterprises. Marketing literature has often emphasized the factors hampering marketing planning and strategizing in small firms. Recent streams of literature in entrepreneurial marketing have nonetheless shown that small firms do indeed engage in marketing activities, even though their marketing has a distinctive and peculiar nature that does not necessarily reflect codified marketing processes and practices observed in large organizations. Within this line of research, the article focuses on the role of the entrepreneur in marketing in small firms. A conceptual model is proposed in which sensemaking activities carried out by the entrepreneur function as interpretive frameworks in order to create novel business concepts and to construct to the symbolic elements at the basis of branding and marketing communication. We state that through sensemaking and the resulting discourses entrepreneurs gain access to and coalesce valuable resources and they clarify and make visible to consumers the value and meaning of novel entrepreneurial ideas. The conceptual model poses sensemaking and the construction of narratives and discourses at the center of entrepreneurial marketing. Marketing in small firms, according to the proposed model, is strictly related to entrepreneurial sensemaking and marketing communication in small firms is nurtured and structured by the construction of articulated discourses by the entrepreneur. The model is explicated and completed through the analysis of four case studies in mature industries.