A study of the marketing knowledge among single person businesses

Abstract: The purpose is to gain an understanding of the marketing knowledge and tools single person businesses have and use within the service sector in southern Sweden. Previous research on single person businesses in Sweden and their marketing knowledge and usage of marketing tools is very scarce. Many small firms suffer from resource poverty and this is often a reason for why they market their firms in certain ways. By asking single person business owners why, how and what they do to market their firms the authors will find a general pattern and a deeper understanding. During a pre-study conducted to capture the essence of the issue before starting the research, it was found that there existed several marketing knowledge gaps. It is therefore of interest to study the marketing knowledge among single person business owners in Sweden. To meet the purpose a qualitative research approach was chosen. The qualitative data was collected through six in-depth interviews with single person business owners. The answers from the interviews generated a picture of the usage of marketing knowledge and tools among single person business owners in Sweden. The result of this study showed that all of the single person business owners thought that since their firms were small businesses, well developed marketing strategies was more of a luxury than a necessity. It was clear that they instead used effectual reasoning when marketing their firms. Concerning knowledge, the results showed that a mixture of education and work experience is the optimal combination. It was also clear that service firms usually find difficulties with intangibility and all of the interviewees knew that they have to use a special approach when marketing services. Through the authors’ findings, it is hard to tell if there is an optimal marketing strategy since most of the interviewees do not perform any follow-ups and therefore do not know what works and what does not.