Innovative Marketing Strategies Adopted by MSMEs: A Comparative Study of Manufacturing, Trading and Service Enterprises

Abstract

Micro, small and medium enterprises operate under resource constraints that make conventional marketing expenditure difficult to sustain, yet they compete in markets increasingly shaped by digital channels and rapid product turnover. This study examines the extent to which MSMEs in Mysuru district, Karnataka, adopt innovative marketing strategies across five domains — product and service innovation, innovative pricing, innovative promotion, innovative distribution and customer reach, and digital marketing innovation — and assesses whether adoption differs systematically across manufacturing, trading and service enterprises. Primary data were collected from 50 enterprises, all of which qualify as micro units under the composite MSME classification notified by the Government of India in June 2020, through a structured questionnaire administered on a five-point Likert scale. Scale reliability was examined item by item and the instrument was purified before composite scores were computed. One-way analysis of variance with Tukey HSD post-hoc comparison was used to test sectoral differences, and multiple linear regression was used to model perceived business performance as a function of the five strategy domains. The results show that sector of operation is strongly associated with the marketing innovation profile of an enterprise. Service enterprises recorded the highest adoption of digital marketing (M = 4.08) and promotional innovation (M = 4.12), trading enterprises led on pricing innovation (M = 4.08), and manufacturing enterprises recorded the lowest adoption on every outward-facing domain and the lowest perceived business performance (M = 3.55). Enterprise type explained 43.1 per cent of the variance in digital marketing adoption. The regression model was significant (F = 6.342, p < 0.001) and explained 41.9 per cent of the variance in perceived business performance, with innovative pricing (β = 0.282, p = 0.021) and innovative distribution (β = 0.237, p = 0.049) emerging as the only significant individual predictors. The study also reports that the product innovation and distribution sub-scales did not achieve acceptable internal consistency, and findings relating to those constructs must be treated as indicative rather than confirmatory.