Market orientation of the Hungarian SMEs working in the meat processing and dairy industries

Abstract

Abstract We are looking for the answer as to what tendencies were indicative of the future development of required marketing activity of the SMEs in the article dealing with the marketing activity of the SMEs working in the food industry. The article is based on a nationwide survey among 200 SMEs working in the food processing industry. In this article, we focus on the SMEs working in the dairy and meat processing industries. The results of the nationwide research and some domestic references refer to that there is a latent demand of effective marketing activity among small and medium-sized enterprises. It manifests itself in specifying marketing-related fields to be improved in the future. The marketing itself is believed not to be an important field at the same time. This apparent opposition is the small enterprise marketing paradox in the background of which is the lack of knowledge about the marketing instruments. It can be stated that these small businesses collect mainly general market information and have no information about particular products. Therefore, the presence of marketing planning is really rare and where there is some kind of planning it is not connected to available funds and follow-up control. The marketing strategy can be characterized by products processed mainly at low or medium level. Therefore, market position is deffned by “lower price-good quality”. They mainly use the traditional distribution channels and their communication is accidental and has a low level. The marketing-oriented way of thinking still exists among the factors affecting entrepreneurial behaviour, which cannot be found at the level of clusters, according to our results. We could identify 8.3% of the enterprises as having satisfactory marketing activity.