Entrepreneurial marketing: Exploring its place in social enterprises

Abstract

The activities of social enterprises have been neglected despite the efforts of the government, individuals, and other supportive agencies. Much of this neglect could be attributed to the failure to adopt suitable business model/entrepreneurial marketing (EM) models that address the many challenges these enterprises face. This paper aims to evaluate extant literature and models on EM to propose a new and comprehensive model for social enterprises. In this pursuit, a background literature review on EM was conducted in several peer-reviewed journals. Eight core dimensions were adapted from existing models: social innovativeness, social proactiveness, socially calculated risk-taking, social resources leveraging, social customer intensity, social value creation, social market sense, and social alliance. Based on these dimensions, a new and all-inclusive model of SEM is proposed. This paper concludes that applying these EM dimensions to social enterprises would significantly promote innovative and sustainable success.