Effects of Market Branding on the Growth of Small Scale Business in Kenya.

Abstract

In the ever changing world where customers' preferences and behavior in making decisions about which product to buy or service to use the selling company has to build and retain their brand in a way which makes it essential to the customer. Customers respond differently to company and brand images. Brand 'image' is defined as perceptions about a brand as reflected by the brand associations held in consumer memory (Keller, 1993). Brand identity is the way a company aims to identify or position itself. The brand identity clearly specifies what the brand aspires to stand for and has multiple roles (Konecnik and Go, 2008). First, it is a set of associations that the brand strategist seeks to create and maintain. The research designs to be employed in this study were a descriptive survey. The major purpose of descriptive research design will be to describe the state of affairs as it is at present. The population of this study included the management of small scale business located within Nairobi region. The researcher then used simple random sampling techniques to select 60 small scale businesses within the Nairobi city and 1 respondent from each small scale business forming a total of 60 respondents who will form the sample population size for this study.The study collected primary data. Questionnaires were used to obtain important information about the population. The researcher used both qualitative and quantitative techniques in analyzing the data. A content analysis and descriptive analysis was employed; which included mean, frequencies and percentages. The study found that market branding strategy adopted by SMEs enhance growth in sales turnover, these market branding strategy adopted by SMEs enhanced growth in sales turnover, through increased sales volume, increased awareness of company brand thus increased sales, increasing customer satisfaction thus increasing sales, creating perception in the customer mind of the brand quality and increased competitive edge over competitor thus increased customer satisfaction. The study further revealed that market branding strategies adopted by SMEs enhance profitability in SMEs. Market brandings strategy lead to increased sales turnover which leads to increased profits, market branding strategy lead to increased market share thus increased sales volume and hence increased profits. Thus the study concludes that market branding strategies adopted by SMEs enhance profitability in SMEs. The study further found that markets branding strategies adopted by SMEs increases their market share, these strategies were ; increased penetration in the market , branded advertisements, brand logo, a name and brand slogan, brand graphic design and color scheme , promotion , branded t-shirts ,branded gifts and trade shows