The Role of Mobile Phone in Enhancing Marketing Performance of Women - <I>Owned Micro and Small Enterprise in Mbeya</I> 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 businessenhancing 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.