The Marketing Challenges Of Spaza Shops In Developing African Countries: The South African Challenge

Spaza shop marketing simply means marketing strategies that benefit small businesses. In this time of global recession, small companies are exceptionally proactive in keeping sales up. A number of market related challenges have been identified as contributing to the failure of Spaza shops in South Africa. The research problem of this study emanates from the current high business failure rate. The research investigates whether marketing challenges of Spaza shops contribute to high business failure rate in South Africa. The main hypothesis of the research tried to establish whether there is a positive correlation between lack of marketing skills and business failure of Spaza shops. The conclusion is that a positive correlation exists between marketing skills and business failure in South Africa. In order for the researcher to identify whether all of the marketing challenges contribute to business failure the main hypothesis was divided in five secondary hypotheses. The research has established that there is a significant correlation between the different variables such as competition; low demand of their products; poor locality of their small business; lack of market knowledge; ineffective marketing their products and business failure of Spaza shops. The South African challenge is to improve the marketing skills of small business owners as small business is considered to be the panacea for South Africa’s unemployment problems.