Marketing conception in SMEs: a paradigm shift, why SMEs fail to adopt marketing in Hefei, China

China, at present, is a rapidly growing economy. Just like other developed countries in the world, SMEs play a vital role and contribute substantially to the economic growth of China. Marketing also plays the same role in SMEs' growth, but marketing conception in SMEs has been a continuous issue among academicians and practitioners. This research is an endeavour to investigate the marketing conception held by the owners (entrepreneurs) of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Hefei, China, as compared to the marketing conception developed in academic literature while using three different marketing paradigms (i.e., transaction, relationship and induction marketing approaches). The second objective of this research is to know why entrepreneurs fail to adopt a marketing approach in their firms (SMEs). In order to achieve our objectives, we collected data randomly from SMEs in different sectors and our results show that there is no significant difference, except with some, regarding the perception of marketing concepts. Also we found, the main reason of failure was high costs and the entrepreneurs' priority to focus on the quality of the products.