Dissertation (MA Business Administration)
The aim of this study was to examine the influence of marketing mix on performance of leather products enterprises in Tanzania. This included looking at how product, price, promotion and place influence performance of leather products enterprises in terms of profit and ROI. The population of study included all leather products enterprises in Dodoma and Mwanza region with the sample size of 134. A multiple linear regression model was used to conduct the analysis. The study found that product design, variety, and label all have an impact on performance (profit), with P values of 0.000, 0.002, and 0.018 and for ROI the P-values was 0.000, 0.001 and 0.049 respectively. Again, price is significantly related to performance to its component of price discount, cost based pricing and credit term pricing with 0.002, 0.000 and 0.000 p-value respectively for profit and the P-value for ROI was 0.034, 0.000 and 0.000 respectively. Moreover, promotion variable has been found to have significant influence with advertisement and personal selling while sales promotion has shown insignificant influence towards performance with 0.001, 0.000 and 0.136 P-value respectively for profit and for ROI the P-value was 0.001, 0.000 and 0.201 respectively. Place also has shown the positive significant influence towards the performance especially by using location and distribution component while inventory has shown insignificant influence toward performance since it have greater P-value such as 0.001, 0.000 and 0.159 respectively for profit and for ROI the P-value was 0.000, 0.000 and 0.516 respectively. Additionally when combining all independent variables with respect to performance has shown significant influence. Product, price, place and promotion their P-values for profit were 0.045, 0.002, 0.000 and 0.000 respectively. For ROI only product has insignificant influence with P-values of 0.073 while price, place and promotion were significant with P-values of 0.038, 0.000 and 0.000 respectively. The findings imply that when the enterprises use either products or price or place or promotion in their business this elements will have significant influence towards performance but when they combining all element in their business operation will have more influence towards their performance. Lastly, it is recommended in this study that most of the leather products enterprises to introduce and use marketing mix in their operation since it has been observed that few of them they apply in their operation.