Measuring the marketing performances of state forest enterprises in Turkey

Today, any enterprise has to consider marketing as important as production. Production and marketing are two complementary activities in enterprises. The increase in marketing effectiveness is achieved through measuring the activity outcomes that can be described as marketing performance. Because marketing is a social science and, therefore, determining the marketing performance system concretely, examining it and determining its principles may not be possible, a need for a new model was felt to represent the real system, and, consequently, a multi dimensional purpose-system model was developed. This model was applied in the eighty-nine state forest enterprises in Turkey which are branches of the General Directorate of Forestry and which are run on the principles of business enterprise. This study covers a limited period of time (1999 - 2003), and 41 variables were developed in order to measure the marketing performances of these enterprises. As a result of the statistical analyses, the total production area (TPA), total production costs (TPC), total number of the personnel working in the management unit (TNPWM), total growing stock (TGS), total investment amount (TIA), number of the assistant personnel separated from the management unit (NAPSM), distance to city center (DCC), total marketing/sale expenditure (TME), total management unit area (TMUA), total sales (TS), total forest area (TFA), total personnel expenditures (TPE), total production amount (TPAM) and total market priced product income (TMPPI) were found to be the most important marketing variables in the state forest enterprises. It was also found that the marketing performance could be explained 77.328% with the 14 variables that were used in this model.