Application of the marketing mix by small business: a focus group analysis of B40 mumpreneurs / Amirah Mohamad Fuzi and Nurul Hidayana Mohd Noor

Small businesses are essential as they contribute significantly to the country's economic income, increase job opportunities, and support social development. The marketing mix is a set of controllable and strategic marketing elements a business can employ to produce the desired response in the target market. By using the elements in the marketing mix, the business can perform marketing activities to influence the demand for its products. It contains five elements: product, price, place, promotion, and people. To this day, the 5P model remains the most popular in most marketing literature. Thus, the study aims to explore and assess the current marketing mix practice among B40 mumpreneurs. The B40 groups have a limited social support system. In addition, most of them also have a low-moderate level of education. This makes it difficult for them to manage their businesses. This study involves two series of focus-group interviews. Each focus-group interviews involve six informants. Thematic analysis was employed to analyze data, which consists of reading through a group of data and looking for patterns of meaning in the data to find themes. The study has revealed that the current practice of the 5Ps marketing mix is quite challenging for B40 mumpreneurs. The government must support these groups with more exposure to sound, practical, and beneficial marketing management methods and provide more business assistance such as capital, networking, mentoring and coaching, training and development, and equipment and machinery assistance.