An Analysis of marketing strategies of handloom industry in Maruthamunai

Abstract

Handloom textile industry in Sri Lanka is a rural based industry where labor force is highly used. It has gained high socio economic importancedue to the significant employment generating potential especially among the rural women. As such, Maruthamunai, in the far north of Ampara District is the only village producing handloom garments in the district and is very well known in Sri Lanka for its handloom products. It is observed that handloom industries have rare demand for the products due to the ineffectiveness of marketing strategies and knowledge used in the industries activities. Therefore what effective marketing strategies need for the development of handloom industries in Maruthamunai is identified as the research problem of the study. The objective of the study is to find out the effective strategies for the development of the industry. For the purpose of finding out the level of effectiveness of marketing strategies for the handloom industries, the research considered four types of marketing strategies as conceptualization. Those are product, price, place and promotion related strategies. Data was collected through structured questionnaire. 200 samples were randomly selected from involving entrepreneurs of entire eight G.N. divisions of Maruthamunai. The collected data were analyzed by using SPSS with Univariate measures, such as mean, mode and standard deviation. Evaluation was made based on the average mean values of the strategies such as ineffectiveness, moderate effectiveness and effectiveness. It was found that product, price, place related strategies are moderate effective for handloom industries development, but the promotion related strategies were found ineffective in promoting handloom marketing.