Influence of Marketing Strategies and Stakeholder’s Engagement on Sales Growth of Coffee Export in Kenya

Abstract

The Kenya coffee sector is dominated by small-scale production with smallholder farmers controlling over seventy five percent of land under production. In July 2021, the number of coffee sales in Kenya was recorded at 1.2 thousand metric tons, showing a recovery in considerations with previous months. However, untimely drop of prices in the coffee export firms, large fixed costs entangled in coffee processing and marketing, the imbalance between supply and demand, not making timely and effective decisions, give rise to major risks for smallholder’s gain in cooperatives, hence low productivity. Marketing strategies implicate the schemes involved in overseeing enlargement of market for product to the firm’s consumers. There was no much analysis and reports written to show beyond doubt how stakeholder engagement impacted on marketing strategies plus sales growth of coffee export in Kenya and how good they could be put to bring the most effective results in a firm. Therefore, this study sought evaluation of the effect brought about by marketing methods and stakeholder’s engagement on the sales growth of Kenya coffee export. This was done through analyzing effects of strategies that included market penetration, product development, digital marketing, market diversification and sales growth of coffee export. The research was directed by five theories, which encompassed; market penetration theory, innovation diffusion, market entry mode, product lifecycle and stakeholder engagement. A study design entailed mixed design and a target populace consisted marketing managers in all 157 coffee exporting firms in Kenya. This comprised of 384 respondents as a sample size. A structured questionnaire was developed for use to allow relevant information from the respondents of the study. Administrative consent was taken from each coffee exporting firm to participate in the study. A pilot test on 20 managers which translated to five percent of the target population was used. Scrutinization of information gathered was through description statistics. The data analyzes was via SPSS version 25, while Multiple regression was fitted for analysis and the null hypotheses test level of significance was 0.05. Descriptive summaries were presented in form of tables (Frequencies, percentages, mean and standard deviation) and Multicollinearity was assessed using the Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) and covariance matrix. Homoscedasticity assumption was assessed using Levene’s test for equality of variance. The research found out that, Market penetration strategy, Digital marketing strategy, Marketing diversification strategy, Product development strategy and Stakeholder’s engagement strategy achieved an influence on the sales growth of Kenyan coffee exports, which were statistically significant. Hence the recommendations that Coffee stakeholders should embrace all the strategies that portrayed positive effects on sales growth in the research to boost the sales growth of coffee export in Kenya. The Government should also come up with policies to ensure farmers get value for their work, programs for trainings and production machines to create coffee varieties. Further, another research may be taken up to establish other marketing strategies as well as other exports like tea, pyrethrum that need to improve sales increase.