Research reveals why traditional frameworks fail entrepreneurs working with limited resources

Business Analysis | 15 January 2026

Every business student learns the 4Ps of marketing: product, price, place, promotion. The framework has dominated marketing education for six decades, shaping how generations of entrepreneurs think about reaching customers and building markets.

But new research suggests this venerable model may be steering small business owners in the wrong direction. A study published in the Frontline Marketing, Management and Economics Journal argues that the 4Ps framework, whilst useful for large corporations, fundamentally misunderstands how small and medium-sized enterprises actually create value and compete.

The findings have significant implications for business education, policy support for SMEs, and how entrepreneurs themselves think about marketing strategy.

A Framework Built for Giants

The 4Ps framework emerged in the 1960s during the heyday of mass marketing. Companies like Procter & Gamble and General Motors dominated markets through sophisticated market research, extensive distribution networks, and massive advertising campaigns.

The model assumed certain conditions: stable markets where customer preferences could be researched and predicted, substantial budgets allowing systematic testing and refinement of strategies, time to develop long-term plans before execution, and organisational structures capable of coordinating complex marketing activities.

These assumptions made sense for the corporations that dominated post-war economies. Marketing became a professional discipline with established methodologies, career paths, and academic departments.

Business schools taught the 4Ps as universal principles applicable to any organisation. Entrepreneurs learned to think about marketing the same way corporate marketing managers did, just with smaller budgets.

A Different Reality

The research team, led by Hajirah Farooq from Scholars School System (Leeds Trinity University Partnership) and including scholars from across the UK and Spain, examined whether this universalist assumption holds for small businesses.

Their analysis suggests it doesn’t. SMEs operate in fundamentally different conditions than the large corporations for which traditional marketing frameworks were designed.

Small businesses face constant uncertainty about market conditions, customer preferences, and competitive dynamics. They work with minimal budgets that preclude extensive market research or advertising campaigns. Decision-making happens quickly, often based on intuition and direct customer feedback rather than systematic analysis. Owner-managers typically handle marketing alongside numerous other responsibilities, without specialist staff or external agencies.

“The 4Ps assume a level of stability, resources, and organisational capacity that most small firms simply don’t have,” explains Dr Kennedy Oberhiri Obohwemu from PENKUP Research Institute, one of the study’s authors. “Entrepreneurs make decisions before they can conduct formal planning. They pivot constantly based on immediate feedback. Their marketing is inseparable from customer relationships and operational realities.”

This doesn’t mean small businesses ignore product, price, place, and promotion. They obviously make decisions about all four elements. The question is whether the framework captures how those decisions actually happen and what drives marketing success in resource-constrained, uncertain environments.

Entrepreneurial Marketing

The research proposes that small businesses succeed through what scholars call “entrepreneurial marketing,” a qualitatively different approach from traditional marketing.

Entrepreneurial marketing emphasises four characteristics that distinguish it from corporate practice.

Opportunity recognition comes first. Successful entrepreneurs constantly scan their environment for unmet needs, emerging gaps, and shifting patterns of demand. They spot opportunities before formal market structures develop and move quickly to exploit them.

This isn’t systematic market research but a more intuitive process drawing on experience, network connections, and direct customer interaction. Entrepreneurs create markets rather than analysing existing ones.

Resource leverage allows firms to compensate for limited budgets. Rather than spending their way to market presence, successful SMEs use partnerships, networks, and creative problem-solving to achieve objectives that would otherwise require substantial capital.

The research describes this as “bricolage,” making do with available resources through ingenuity rather than investment. A constraint becomes an advantage if you’re clever enough.

Customer intimacy replaces mass-market segmentation. Small firms maintain direct relationships with customers, learning from every interaction and adjusting offerings in real time. This creates knowledge and trust that larger competitors struggle to replicate.

Adaptive experimentation substitutes for long-term planning. Entrepreneurs test ideas quickly, learn from failures, and iterate based on feedback. The emphasis shifts from getting strategy right initially to developing through successive approximations.

Complementary, Not Contradictory

Importantly, the research doesn’t advocate abandoning the 4Ps entirely. Rather, it positions entrepreneurial marketing as operating at a different level.

Entrepreneurial marketing provides the strategic orientation, shaping how firms identify and pursue opportunities. The 4Ps remain useful as tactical vocabulary for expressing decisions once opportunities have been recognised.

“Think of it as two layers,” suggests Dr Fidelis Evwiekpamare Olori from Global Banking School (Oxford Brookes University Partnership), another team member. “Entrepreneurial marketing is the sensing mechanism that identifies opportunities through informal networks and customer conversations. Traditional frameworks then structure how you communicate and implement specific choices within that broader orientation.”

A coffee shop owner might spot an opportunity through customer conversations, noting that people want somewhere to work remotely with reliable Wi-Fi. That’s opportunity recognition through customer intimacy. Once validated, she still needs to make decisions about product offerings (menu items and workspace configuration), pricing (balancing affordability with profitability), place (location and ambience), and promotion (how to communicate the value proposition).

The 4Ps provide a useful checklist for those decisions. But they don’t explain how the opportunity was recognised initially or how the business will continue adapting based on customer feedback.

Digital Amplification

The research highlights how digital platforms have amplified the importance of entrepreneurial marketing. Social media, e-commerce tools, and digital analytics allow SMEs to compete with much larger firms at minimal cost.

However, success requires exactly the capabilities that entrepreneurial marketing emphasises: rapid experimentation, direct customer engagement, network leverage, and quick adaptation to feedback.

A small retailer can test product variations through Instagram, gather immediate feedback, and adjust offerings faster than a corporate competitor constrained by lengthy approval processes and quarterly planning cycles. The digital environment rewards the entrepreneurial approach whilst exposing limitations of traditional planning-based marketing.

Studies cited in the research demonstrate that SMEs’ digital marketing capabilities became crucial during post-pandemic recovery. Firms that could improvise, experiment, and engage customers directly through digital channels maintained competitiveness despite economic disruption.

What This Means for Entrepreneurs

The findings carry practical implications for business owners.

Stop trying to replicate what corporations do. You don’t have their resources, and you don’t need their approach. Your advantage lies in speed, flexibility, and customer intimacy, not in sophisticated market research or expensive advertising campaigns.

Invest in relationships with customers. Create mechanisms for gathering feedback quickly and learning from it. Every customer conversation is potential market research. Every complaint or suggestion reveals opportunities for improvement or innovation.

Use networks to compensate for limited budgets. Partnerships, collaborations, and informal alliances can extend your reach and capabilities without proportional increases in expenditure.

Experiment systematically. Test ideas cheaply before committing serious resources. Learn from failures quickly. Iterate based on feedback rather than betting everything on initial plans.

Think of the 4Ps as a communication tool rather than a planning framework. They help articulate decisions to stakeholders, employees, or investors. But don’t let them constrain how you actually discover opportunities and engage with markets.

Implications for Policy

The research also speaks to policymakers responsible for supporting small business development.

Current support programmes typically focus on access to finance, regulatory compliance, and operational efficiency. Marketing capabilities receive far less attention, perhaps because policymakers assume entrepreneurs can simply apply textbook frameworks.

The study suggests this misses something important. Marketing in small firms isn’t just a scaled-down version of corporate marketing. It requires different capabilities: opportunity recognition, resource leverage, relationship building, and rapid experimentation.

Policy interventions should therefore include targeted support for these entrepreneurial marketing capabilities. This might involve subsidised access to digital tools, training in customer engagement strategies, platforms facilitating network development, and funding structures that accommodate experimental, iterative approaches rather than requiring detailed plans before funding approval.

Regulatory frameworks should also facilitate rather than hinder entrepreneurial marketing. Policies that make collaboration easier, reduce barriers to data sharing, and support micro-innovation would enhance SMEs’ ability to leverage resources creatively and respond to opportunities.

Rethinking Business Education

Perhaps the most significant implications concern how marketing is taught in business schools and entrepreneurship programmes.

If entrepreneurial marketing is qualitatively different from corporate marketing, teaching entrepreneurs using frameworks designed for corporations may be counterproductive. It’s not just that small firms need to adapt the 4Ps to their resource constraints, it’s that they operate with different logics altogether.

Business education should incorporate entrepreneurial marketing as a distinct domain. This means teaching opportunity recognition skills, resource leverage strategies, relationship-building techniques, and experimental methods alongside conventional marketing tools.

It also means being honest about the limitations of traditional frameworks when applied to small business contexts. The 4Ps remain useful for certain purposes, but they don’t capture how successful entrepreneurs actually create and capture value.

Questions Remaining

Despite two decades of research into entrepreneurial marketing, significant questions remain unanswered.

How do successful entrepreneurs balance intuition with analysis? The romantic image of the visionary founder making bold intuitive leaps doesn’t match reality. Many combine instinct with careful reflection and data use. Understanding that balance would provide more actionable guidance.

How does entrepreneurial marketing vary across sectors? Manufacturing, professional services, and technology ventures likely require different approaches, but comparative research remains limited.

What happens as firms grow? Entrepreneurial marketing may suit early-stage ventures, but do successful firms eventually need to adopt more traditional approaches as they scale? Or can entrepreneurial marketing principles be maintained at larger sizes?

How do emerging technologies affect entrepreneurial marketing? Artificial intelligence, platform economies, and advanced analytics are changing how small firms operate. The research doesn’t yet address these developments comprehensively.

A Growing Recognition

The study reflects growing recognition that entrepreneurship and corporate management involve different capabilities, face different challenges, and require different approaches.

This applies beyond marketing. Research on entrepreneurial finance, strategy, and operations increasingly emphasises how entrepreneurial contexts differ from corporate ones.

The danger of ignoring these differences is that we teach entrepreneurs to think like corporate managers, potentially undermining the distinctive capabilities that make entrepreneurship valuable in the first place.

“Small businesses don’t just do things on a smaller scale,” concludes Dr Kingsley Chimaobi Akabuokwu from Research Consortium Limited, a co-author. “They do things differently. Understanding those differences, rather than treating them as deviations from some corporate ideal, is crucial for both theory and practice.”

Whether business education, policy support, and advisory services will adapt accordingly remains to be seen. But the evidence suggests they should.

About the Study

The research, “Entrepreneurial Marketing in Small and Medium Enterprises: A Conceptual Reappraisal of Theory, Practice, and the Boundaries of the 4Ps Framework,” appears in Frontline Marketing, Management and Economics Journal, Volume 6, Issue 1. The study was conducted by researchers from Leeds Trinity University, Oxford Brookes University, Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia, and other institutions across the UK and Spain, with support from PENKUP Research Institute in Birmingham.