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Entrepreneurial Marketing in the Last Decade – A Literature Rev...

Entrepreneurial Marketing in the Last Decade – A Literature Review

Marketing and Entrepreneurship research streams have flourished in the last decade. Their intersection ‘entrepreneurial marketing’ however, is still in its infancy and the link between these two disciplines has not been adequately researched.

By reviewing the literature from this dynamic research domain over last 10 years, this paper seeks to systematize the different approaches and the underlying theories and constructs used. This study outlines the theoretical foundations of entrepreneurial marketing as well as the constructs considered in entrepreneurial marketing research. In doing this, we have challenged the subdomains where results might be susceptible to the common method bias.

We conducted a keyword search in the most commonly used online databases and performed forward and backward chaining on the articles that were revealed to find additional publications that are necessary for this field of research. Finally, we compiled a total of 79 articles that were relevant to this study. By restricting our analysis to contributions in the field of entrepreneurship that have a genuine reference to entrepreneurial marketing or to the marketing perspective in general, we sorted out all the articles that were mistakenly classified in the entrepreneurial marketing domain.

Evaluating the remaining articles confirmed earlier assessments of the insufficient use of theory, but considered more precise dimensions in the studies and constructs used to quantify the latent variables. We identified a substantial heterogeneity of approaches, which indicates that the intersection of the entrepreneurship and marketing domains is undoubtedly challenging. We identified a lack of theory comparisons in the explanation and prediction of observed phenomena in entrepreneurial marketing. We revealed a similar outcome for the combination of theoretical explanations and the current landscape of knowledge in entrepreneurial marketing. Additionally we discovered gaps in content, instruments, processes, research-design and data quality.