Competitive Marketing Competencies of Dairy Cooperatives in Machakos County, Kenya

The objective of the study was to explore the competitive marketing competencies of Dairy Cooperatives in Machakos County, Kenya. The competencies were explored with respect to customer perspective competencies, competitors’ perspective competencies, pricing perspective competencies, promotions perspective competencies, and distribution perspective competencies. The study was a qualitative descriptive research. Data was collected through face to face interviews with an interview guide being used as the primary tool for data collection. A census of all the 15 Dairy Cooperatives registered by Lower Eastern Dairy Cooperatives Alliance (LEDCA) was conducted. Thus the unit of observation was the cooperative board and the unit of analysis, the cooperative. The analysis involved categorization of the responses into common themes. Firstly, with respect to customer’s perspective competencies, the study concludes for low levels of customer perspective marketing competencies. The cooperatives do not conduct regular market surveys, as such this limits their knowledge of customer behavior. Equally, apart from product quality, there is limited adoption of unique differentiating customer retention and attraction strategies among the cooperatives. Secondly, based on the competitors’ perspective competencies, the study concludes for low competencies in competitive marketing. Despite the cooperatives being well aware of their sources of competition, competitors’ weaknesses and strengths, the capability to executive a mix of strategies to exploit competitors’ weaknesses and overcome competitors’ strength is limited. For instance, while 50 % indicated that low product quality was a major weakness by the competitors’, only about half (27 %) responded by improving quality of their products to take advantage of this weakness. Similarly, while 16 % identified poor customer relations by the competitors, only 8 % responded by improving their customer relation to take advantage