Abstract

SME is one of the government's initiatives to reduce the poverty rate in Malaysia and reduce the income gap between the rural and urban population. Therefore, entrepreneurs play an important role in managing the business as well as improving business income and performance. There have a few indicators in measuring the business performance. Thus, this study conducted to identify the influence of customer orientation and marketing innovation towards SME’s performance. A theoretical framework is developing to give a clear picture on the area study. A set of questionnaires distribute to the 283 SMEs entrepreneurs randomly in East Coast Malaysia. Then, the collected data analysed by using Smart-PLS. The value of internal consistency, convergent validity, coefficient of determination, R-square, etc. were discussed. Then, hypothesis testing was conducted and the result shows that customer orientation has no relationship with business performance, meanwhile marketing innovation has relationship with business performance. This study very important as it can give good information to academicians, consumers, businesses, and policy makers.

Keywords: SME; customer orientation; marketing innovation; business performance; East Coast Malaysia