Customer – Centric informal business marketing in Africa: the case of Ethiopian MSMEs

ABSTRACT Many sub-Saharan African countries promote micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) to play crucial roles in Africa's socio-economic development. However, evidence from previous research highlights that enterprises remain informal, small, and with low performance due to the formidable challenges. Previous efforts that attempt to understand what challenges/determines the enterprises' performance considerably focus on factors outside the MSMEs, with little attention to the enterprises' own market and customer-focused activities. The current study examines the effect of the enterprises' market-focused activities on their performance by conducting an empirical survey among 150 enterprises in Ethiopia. Apart from extending the conceptualization on the role of market-focused practices, the study suggests development workers complement their efforts by backing the enterprises' endeavours to entirely focus on customer-centric operations.