ANALYSIS OF EFFECTS OF ADOPTION OF MARKETING ORIENTATION ON SUCCESS OF MARKETING STRATEGIES IN MICROFINANCE INSTITUTIONS IN NAIROBI -KENYA

Abstract

Successful marketing starts with a considered, well-informed marketing strategy. Contrary to earlier philosophies such as production orientation, marketing oriented organizations are driven by a shift towards a marketplace that caters for customer wants and needs rather than strict delivery of product features and functionality. Marketing orientation is recognized as the cornerstone of modern marketing. According to the Financial Sector Regulators Forum, September 2018, Issue No. 9 - the banking subsector, which comprises of commercial banks, mortgage finance companies and microfinance institutions (MFIs); banks account for more than 60% of total assets in the sector as at December 2017 Comparatively, Micro Finance Institutions continue having existential problems where poor customer focus, among other issues has been cited. This research sought to establish the effect of adoption of marketing orientation on the success of marketing strategies of MFIs in Kenya. The research determined extent to which MFIs had adopted marketing orientation and further analyzed the effects of customer focus, competitor focus, interfunctional focus and marketing intelligence focus on the success of marketing strategies in the surveyed MFIs. A Census approach was applied on a population of MFIs N=67 who were members of Association of Micro Finance Institutions (AMFI-K) in 2016. The Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of the MFIs and the marketing managers provided the information through a questionnaire used as the main data collection instrument. The data collected was analyzed using Pearson‟s Rank Correlation to establish whether there existed any relationship among the study variables. Multiple linear regression was used to examine how independent variables under study contributed to the dependent variable. The main finding was that customer focus and interfunctional focus had significant effect on success of marketing strategies of MFIs in Nairobi (p=0.020, p=0.003) respectively. However, the finding on the effects of competitor focus and marketing intelligence focus were not significant (p=0.251, p=0.752) respectively. The finding of R2 was 0.383 and therefore marketing orientation conceptual framework used could only explain 38.3% of observed variables. The conclusion therefore was that customer focus and interfunctional focus had significant influence on marketing orientation and also significant potential effect on success of marketing strategies which were measured by selected non-financial parameters for success in the MFIs sector. The moderating effect of MFIs‟ legal structure, membership and type of MFIs was also significant which means that marketing orientation had different effects on MFIs depending on the moderating variable characteristics. The main recommendation of this research was for MFIs to adopt marketing orientation and to emphasize on customer focus and interfunctional focus. This study recommended further research to determine why competitor focus and marketing intelligence focus effects on marketing strategies in Microfinance institutions in Nairobi were not significant.