The impact of marketing strategies on marketing performance of textile and building industries under economic depression

The today's business environment is so dynamic and complex and this conditions became made even more complicated when economic depression has shaded the economy and the production and service sectors are in the grip of the depression. In the situation the firms are under the depression, to adopt marketing strategies that can help them improve their performance by focusing on optimization opportunities, sales growth and acheiving to sustain competitive advantage. At present, the textile and construction industries in Iran are in such a complicated situation so that they face lowered demand and need right marketing strategies. Thus, this research was aimed to explore the significance of marketing strategies for the marketing performance of textile and construction industries and to rank them under economic depression. To this end, the library study was accompanied with field studies. A questionnaire composed of 27 questions was designed and its content validity was confirmed. Then, it was administered among production, marketing, and R&D, and higher managers of nine textile manufacturing firms and 20 construction firms sampled by purposive judgmental technique. After the questionnaires were collected, the reliability of the questionnaire was estimated at greater than 0.7 by Cronbach’s alpha. Data were analyzed by structural equations modeling. The results of confirmatory factor analysis revealed that the values of model fitting indices were appropriate. According to the results of path analysis, the segregate marketing strategy and centralized marketing strategy had significant positive impacts on the market performance of the firms. But, indifferent marketing strategy influenced market performance negatively. Also, Friedman test revealed that the segregate marketing strategy was ranked in the first in both industries.