A commentary on current research at the marketing and entrepreneurship interface
Office Depots generous support ofthe Journal of Small Business ManagementsSmall Business Research Forumand special issue on marketing andentrepreneurship has resulted in a seriesof excellent paper presentations fromwhich this special issue was developed.The two papers that we had the pleasureto work with, and in one caseactually present for the authors, wereBrand Management in Small toMedium-Sized Enterprise, by PierreBerthon, Michael T. Ewing, and JulieNapoli and Understanding Market-Driving Behavior: The Role of Entrepreneurship,by Minet Schindehutte, MikeMorris, and Akin Kocak. We will discusseach paper in terms of what makes thepaper important to scholars who workat the marketing and entrepreneurshipinterface, potential extensions, and thecommon theoretical domain that bothpapers converge upon.Brand Management inSmall to Medium-SizedEnterprisesThis paper is an extension of theEwing and Napoli (2005) brand orientationscale for not-for profits applied toa for-profit small to medium-sized enterprise(SME) context. Berthon, Ewing,and Napoli (2006) contribute greatly toour understanding of the value of anintangible asset (the brand) in theability of an SME to leverage marketingcapabilities to build competitive advantage.The authors propose that brandmanagement practices (BMPs) are performancedrivers and those BMPs canbe used to help differentiate highversuslow-performing SMEs and largeorganizations (Berthon, Ewing, andNapoli 2006).BMP metrics were derived fromKellers (2000) brand report card andtogether on theimportant question of developing an understanding of the interrelationship between marketingand entrepreneurship in the SME context. We hope that this issue will stimulate furtherempirical and conceptual research at the marketing/entrepreneurship interface that is bothmanagerially useful and academically constructive.