Steigerung der Marktorientierung von oberösterreichischen KMU durch externen Wissenstransfer

Due to the ever faster changing framework conditions on the markets, market orientation as a strategic approach to corporate management today represents a key factor for success and survival for companies. However, especially companies in the SME sector have problems in implementing this approach in business practice. Almost 50 % of all newly founded SMEs do not survive the first five years of their life and one of the main reasons for this is the lack of alignment of entrepreneurial thinking and action with market conditions. For this reason, science demands a professionalization of marketing in SMEs as well and sees a need for research in this respect to determine where the concrete deficits in the marketing process lie in practice and how these deficits can be reduced through external knowledge transfer. This paper addresses this problem and examines it on the basis of the Austrian specific situation of the Chamber of Commerce as knowledge provider and its member companies as knowledge consumers. This special constellation allows the investigation of the phenomenon under the idealized conditions that firstly, there is a simplified access to knowledge because the chamber of commerce approaches the enterprises proactively and secondly, the factor of high costs of external consulting is eliminated because the chamber of commerce charges only very moderate contributions towards expenses for its qualification services to the member enterprises. Since this field of research is relatively unexplored in connection with the specific constellation prevailing in Austria, an explorative approach was chosen. The aim is to discover correlations and recognize qualitative potentials with regard to the phenomenon of further development of the marketing process in SMEs through external knowledge transfer. The investigation is based on a single case study of the Chamber of Commerce with the member companies as embedded analysis units. In addition, the views of five experts on marketing in SMEs are obtained by means of interviews in the sense of a triangulation. The research results showed that the central deficits in the companies' marketing process are in the area of strategic marketing and especially in the situation analysis. Despite the idealized conditions prevailing in Upper Austria, these deficits are generally not eliminated by the inclusion of external know-how, as entrepreneurs in the SME sector do not recognize the necessity of a comprehensive, company-specific marketing concept.