Abstract
Despite increased competition across the globe, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are generally said to be behindhand in the execution of formal marketing research. This study, investigated the importance of marketing research practices on the performance of manufacturing SMEs in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Within quantitative method, an analyticalsurvey design was adopted and data was randomly collected from 200 SMEs using semi-structured questionnaire and analyzed using descriptive statistics, cross-tabulation, T-test, and regression analyses through SPSS software: 21 Findings confirm that the majority of manufacturing SMEs in Dar es Salaam do implement marketing research activities in unstructured way. However, an independent t-test reveal that a significant difference exists at 5% level with SMEs which adopts formal marketing research being more likely to grow (p-value = 0.009). Further, the majority of SMEs utilises marketing research information generated by external agents based on personal networks due to pressure from competitive environment and resource constraints. This way, there are no statistical and significant relationships between SMEs performance and the extent of utilising marketing research data generated by external agents at 5% level of chi-square statistics (Χ2 = 14.975; 4 d.f.). Consequently, the regression analysis indicates a significant value less than 0.05 with an adjusted R-square of 0.029. In lieu of this, the extent of executing marketing research activities are on average associated with the performance of SMEs. This is similar to the work of others (Ghouri, Khan, Malik, and Razzaq, 2011; McLarty, Pichanic, and Srpova, 2012) and the underlying theories of marketing by SMEs. The paper proposes a model that can be used to explain the influence of marketing research practices on the performance of SMEs. Also, some recommendations to policy design and marketing practioners including areas for further research are proposed.