The Role of Mobile Phone in Enhancing Marketing Performance of Women - Owned Micro and Small Enterprise in Mbeya Region

Abstract

Mobile phone is considered as an economic tool that can liberate women
entrepreneurs from poverty and empowers them with marketing knowledge.
Although mobile phone can accredit women-owned enterprises with business
enhancing information, services and market opportunities to become efficient,
innovative and competitive, the gains from mobile phones usage rests on the
specific purposes for which business enterprises intend to support, the level of
usage and technological advancement of the country. Moreover, the contribution
of mobile usage in enterprise marketing performance is yet to be harnessed and
little is known on women-owned micro and small enterprises in Mbeya city. As
such, the present study was conducted to assess female owned micro and small
enterprises performance using mobile phone, and to establish the individual effect
of each of the five identified dimensions of mobile phone usage on marketing
performance. Data were collected from 90 enterprises using interview schedule in which cross-sectional survey and stratified random sampling techniques were
employed. Ordinal logistic regression analysis at 95 per cent confidence level was
employed to assess the effect of mobile phone usage on marketing performance.
The findings indicate that using mobile phone for promotional purposes (p =
0.027), transactional use (p = 0.028), marketing intelligence (p = 0.003), and
relationship building (p = 0.045) positively predict marketing performance of an
enterprise. This implies that as enterprises embarks more on using mobile phone
for promoting their products, transacting with their customers, collecting market
intelligence information and building relationship with customers, the more
they gain in their marketing performance. The study also found that, the use of
mobile phone for operational purposes is statistically insignificant (p = 0.601) in
predicting the marketing performance of female micro and small enterprises.
As such, there is no relationship between operational use of mobile phone and
marketing performance of the women owned enterprises. The study concludes
that for mobile phone usage to enhance marketing performance, it depends on
the purpose for which it is put. The study therefore, recommends that women
owned micro and small enterprises should put more emphasis on mobile phone
usage in building promotional capabilities, transactional capabilities, marketing
intelligence capabilities and relational building capabilities as these are likely to
result in enhanced marketing performance.