DO ALL SMEs NEED RM? A MANAGERIAL PERSPECTIVE REGARDING ROMANIAN SMEs

Year 2011, Volume: 3 Issue: 2, 31 - 42, 01.12.2011

Anca-Daniel Vladoı Florin Mıhoc Adela Laura Popa Cristian Hnatıuc Ioan Fotea

Abstract

Competition dynamics within the contemporary economy leads enterprises to
place the customer with his needs and preferences in the center of all their
marketing efforts, in order to build long term customer profitable relationships. In
this context, the concept of relationship marketing attracts broader attention
among business professionals and researchers alike. Relationship marketing in
Romania is adopted and effectively conducted especially in the multinational
companies and large organization context. The SMEs sector represents 99.7 % of
the national economy and it is characterized by diversity, heterogeneity,
flexibility, dynamism and a high degree of adaptability. However, the Romanian
enterprises from this category tend to have a vague notion of marketing in
general, and are prone to operate valuing constructs and instruments specific to
transactional approach. Thus, studying the managerial perspective in the
Romanian SMEs is both useful for SMEs practitioners, in terms of customer
retention increase, and nonetheless for the scholars with similar pursuits in the
research area.
The paper aims to explore the attitudes, perceptions and beliefs of the managers
from the Romanian SMEs regarding relationship marketing concept and also to
analyze in what extent this marketing optic is driven by specific features such as:
enterprise size, industry, customers’ category, internal and contextual factors of
enterprise environment. In this sense, the paper is structured in six sections as
follow: introduction, Romanian SMEs context, SMEs marketing particularity,
research methodology, findings and conclusions.
The research study makes use of both qualitative and quantitative data.
Information collection for the research was conducted in the field of literature,
government documents and national and international statistics. In order to
generate more information regarding the attitudes, perceptions and beliefs of the
managers from the Romanian SMEs towards relationship marketing concept the
research study involved a focus group with some managers, representative from
the point of view of: size, industry, customers, internal and external factors of
SMEs. The paper reveals that the relationship marketing concept has various
perspectives among Romanian managers and its using in practice is especially
avoided due to the financial crisis context

Keywords

relationship marketing, Romanian SMEs, focus group, managerial view

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