A Strategic Perspective to Small Firms in Relationship Marketing: A Case Study of Francistown

Abstract

This paper seeks to advance the strategies which can be employed by small-scale retail outlets as they normally fight for survival. Many small firms face a number of challenges in terms of technology, economic strength, geographic expansion, human resources, and relationship marketing. These challenges emanate duly from the untrained and inexperienced workforce that knows little about the tools needed to market products and services successfully. Not only that, but even many small-scale retail service providers are pushed into their business with very little or actually without any marketing knowledge. They are driven some by seeing small niches in the market or just they have enough capital to start a small business. Little focus is actually made on the longer-term customer lifetime value; hence most of them fail and close down. This paper shall merge the literature review with the practical situation of what is currently happening on the ground. Questionnaires were designed and handed to small-scale retailers in Francistown, and follow-up interviews conducted to a randomly selected number of these retailers. The small retail outlets considered had less than 30 employees, meaning between one and 30 employees. This was done to ensure effective strategies are put in place not only to help new start-up retailers and existing ones, but also big firms that might have been neglecting the importance of relationship marketing. This paper reframes and redefines the strategies for winning small-scale retailers that will compete locally and globally.