| dc.description.abstract | For the last three years there has been a significant growth of telecommunication sector in Kenya. This
is as a result ofliberalization in the sector thorough issuing licenses to several private companies. This
has brought competition in the telecommunication industry especially among mobile phone operators.
Market leaders; Safari com and Celtel are currently enjoying a large market share as compared to new
entrants such Telkom wireless. There is therefore a need for new entrants to generate and implement
marketing strategies in order to close the gap. The main purpose of this study was to address the
problem of marketing strategies evaluation within the context of telecommunication sector by
developing a knowledge based decision support system model for marketing support to ensure that
only competitive marketing strategies are implemented by new market entrants in telecommunication
sector and improve strategy management process especially during marketing strategies formulation
stage. A study was conducted through interviews in five major towns located in Kenya i.e. Nairobi,
Kisumu, Eldoret, Mornbasa and Kitale to determine the cause of low subscription rate. 10 mobile
phone users were randomly selected from each of these towns. Interviews were also conducted in
Three mobile phone companies; Popote Wireless, Cellucom and Telkom Kenya to establish how they
evaluate their marketing strategies and the respondents of these companies were marketing
professionals
Through documentation review, various marketing strategies models were analyzed and two of them
were used to develop a new model. The new marketing strategies model was then implemented using
an information system model which was then evaluated through developing a prototyping and testing
its effectiveness.This research found that new market entrants suffers low rate of subscriptions due to
market related problems. The study revealed that Telkom Company which is a new market entrant has
1% market share as compared to Safaricom with market share of 66%. It was found out that the main
cause of low rate of subscriptions is due to market related problems. To solve this problem, new
marketing strategies evaluating model was proposed and implemented using an information system
model. The effectiveness of this model was evaluated using a prototype which was tested in the three
selected companies. Testing results showed that the model performance is determined by the number
of previous cases stored in the case base. In addition, it was found that change of time does not affect
the effectiveness of the model. It was therefore concluded that Companies stand at a better chance in
implementing successful marketing strategies if they first evaluate their strategies using this model.
The study recommended that there is a need to keep a record of all marketing strategies that are
implemented by companies so that such strategies can be used to evaluate any new strategy before it is
implemented. | en |
