Abstract:
This research work is on the “Marketers perception of the influences of marketing environments in marketing management/practices in selected companies in Enugu State.” As a possinle cause of frequent business failures in Enugu State.
The business organizations were selected from the agricultural industry, transportation industry, manufacturing industry, trading and services industries that are five industries on the whole.
Among the five different industries, four firms were selected from each of the five industries and they were made up of a total of the twenty firms from which data for this research were collected.
The selection of representative firms was in a ratio of 2:1:1 for Enugu, Nsukka and Oji River zones respectively.
A research questionnaire entitled ‘The Marketer and marketing environments relations questionnaire’ was designed and distributed to two hundred respondents on the basis of ten respondents per firm. Out of these, two hundred anticipated respondents actually reacted to the research questionnaire items.
In carrying out this research, the sources of data used in the study were collected mainly from primary sources, though many books and journals were consulted during the review of related literature in Chapter Two.
The first part of the analysis was conducted by collating the mean responses per questionnaire item as they relate to the research question and the mean responses to these research questions were compared with the mean score.
Since our score rating was grading that ranged from five points (5) for Strongly Agree to one point (1) for Strongly Disagree, the mean score of 3.0 became our deciding factor. Any mean response above 3.0 is deemed to show acceptance or agreement while those below 3.0 signified disagreement.
Details of the mean Computation are shown in Appendix I and ii. The Second part of the analysis was done by testing the hypotheses using Z-table to compare the values of the test statistics Z, with the critical value as Zx/2. The computation of the sample standard deviation are shown in Appendix iii.
The study revealed that most Marketing Managers in Enugu State are not professionally qualified and they erroneously feel that with huge working capital, any graduate can be a marketing manager.
Although most of these Mangers know the elements of the marketing environments, they could not differentiate between the micro and macro environmental variables.
Hence,I recommend that only professionally qualified persons should be entrusted with marketing management and that business organizations should always invest on Research and Development Projects in order to adequately move with the dynamics of the marketing environments.
