KOREASCHOLAR

This paper builds on issues that surround the interface between entrepreneurial and digital marketing. In particular, it proposes a conceptual framework that relates digital market knowledge, market representation and decision making in the context of entrepreneurial SMEs. Thus, the paper contributes to the understanding of how entrepreneurs deal with digital market knowledge, and how such knowledge contributes to changes in representing markets and decision making. A growing awareness of the importance of entrepreneurship and innovation to marketing, and of marketing to successful entrepreneurship, has led to attempts to combine the two disciplines as “entrepreneurial marketing”. Scholars debate on the role of marketing in the entrepreneurial process (Schindehutte et al., 2009), and consider the marketing content of the entrepreneurial role (Guercini, 2012). It is argued that entrepreneurial marketing emphasizes the adaptation of marketing to forms that are appropriate to small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), even if entrepreneurial relates more in general to the marketing-entrepreneurship interface and the idea that marketing and entrepreneurship are fundamentally intertwined and necessary to the other. Marketing and the entrepreneurship take place in a context in which information technologies, data communication and data processing technologies are tools to manipulate, organize, transmit, and store information in digital form. More specifically, one of the major changes undergone by traditional marketing is determined by the emergence of digital marketing, which provides several tools and metrics, such as web analytics, for decision makers. However, it is yet not sufficiently clear how entrepreneurs deal with this type of knowledge emerging in a digital context, and how they use it in their decision making. The paper proposes a cross-case analysis based on in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs from SMEs in the fashion industry, a relevant empirical context that has experienced, before others, the implementation of digital marketing strategies. The analysis suggests the existence of different entrepreneurial profiles based on the approach adopted in dealing with digital market knowledge, as well as the existence of different types of relationships between entrepreneurs and digital market knowledge and alternative consequences in terms of decision-making processes.

• Simone Guercini(University of Florence, Italy)
• Matilde Milanesi(University of Florence, Italy)
• Silvia Ranfagni(University of Florence, Italy)