Marketing practices in the Spanish rural tourism sector and their contribution to business outcomes

This paper sets out to highlight the importance of entrepreneurial and market orientations for the success of enterprises operating out of a rural base. Using these two strategic frameworks, this paper identifies the marketing practices undertaken by rural enterprises, and evaluates their effect on business performance, on the local entrepreneur, and on the rural area itself. Enterprises operating from a rural location play a strategic role in the sustainable development of economies, in the context of which the rural tourism sector particularly stands out. The use of marketing practices appropriate to the aims, capacities and resources of such enterprises is proposed as a mechanism for improving their performance. Using the Spanish rural tourism sector as the basis, a scale measuring marketing practices, and another scale reflecting three different types of outcome – financial, those linked personally to the entrepreneur, and those in terms of development of the rural environment – are proposed and validated, and the effect of marketing practices on the performance of such enterprises is analysed. The findings, which reveal that marketing practices have a significant effect on the achievement of outcomes, have implications of interest for the literature and for practitioners in the rural enterprise sector.