Affiliate marketing, marketers’ creative innovation, and SME competitiveness: Mediating customer mix – SME context in tourist areas

In the bustling world of modern business, small shops and family-run enterprises face a constant challenge: how to survive and grow when the rules of commerce are changing faster than ever. For decades, the standard advice was to build a strong product and wait for customers to find it. Today, however, the landscape is dominated by digital platforms where attention is fleeting and competition is global. To navigate this, businesses rely on two powerful tools. The first is a method called affiliate marketing, where independent people—often bloggers, video creators, or social media influencers—promote a product to their followers and earn a small commission if a sale is made. The second is the human spark of creative innovation, the ability of a marketer to come up with fresh, unexpected ideas that capture attention in a crowded digital space. But having these tools is not enough on its own. The real question for business owners is whether these digital strategies actually translate into a stronger, more competitive business, and if so, how they manage to do it.

A team of researchers set out to answer this question by looking at a specific corner of the economy: small fashion businesses located in tourist areas of Indonesia. These are the shops and stalls that sell clothing and accessories to visitors, often relying on the flow of travelers to keep their doors open. The researchers wanted to understand if using affiliate marketing and encouraging their marketers to be more creative actually helped these small businesses become more competitive. They also wanted to see if there was a hidden link in the chain, a factor that connected the marketing efforts to the final success of the business. They focused on something called the "customer mix," which is simply a way of describing the different types of people who make up a business's audience—their personalities, how they behave, what they think, and how they participate in the brand's story.

To find the answers, the researchers conducted a survey with 128 customers who had bought fashion items from these small businesses. These customers were chosen because they had learned about the products through affiliate marketing channels, such as social media posts or videos from independent promoters. The team asked these customers a series of questions to gauge their experiences, their feelings about the products, and how they viewed the businesses. They then used a sophisticated statistical method to analyze the connections between the different factors, essentially mapping out how one thing led to another. The goal was to see if the marketing methods directly improved the business, or if they worked by first changing the way the business understood and interacted with its customers.

The results painted a clear and encouraging picture. The study found that affiliate marketing has a direct, positive impact on how competitive a small business is. When these businesses used independent promoters to reach new people, they saw improvements in their sales, their ability to grow, and their overall strength in the market. Similarly, the creativity of the marketers themselves mattered significantly. When the people promoting the products came up with new, interesting, and unique ways to present the goods, the businesses became more competitive. It was not just about having a good product; it was about having a good story told in a fresh way.

However, the most interesting discovery was how these marketing efforts actually worked. The researchers found that affiliate marketing and creative innovation did not just boost the business directly; they also changed the "customer mix." In other words, these strategies helped the businesses attract a better, more engaged group of people. The independent promoters and creative campaigns drew in customers who were more interested, more likely to participate, and more likely to buy. This shift in the customer base then became the bridge that led to greater competitiveness. The study showed that the customer mix acts as a vital middleman. It is the group of people, their behaviors, and their engagement that actually carry the benefits of the marketing strategies over to the final success of the business.

The data confirmed that this relationship is strong. The customer mix was found to partially mediate, or explain, the connection between the marketing efforts and the business success. This means that while the marketing strategies have their own direct power, a significant portion of their success comes from how well they reshape the audience. The study suggests that almost all the parameters of the customer mix act as important facilitators. They are the essential ingredients that allow a digital marketing trend to turn into real-world growth. For the small fashion businesses in these tourist areas, this means that the key to thriving is not just to sell online, but to use online tools to build a specific, engaged community of customers who feel connected to the brand.

In the end, the research offers a practical roadmap for small business owners in the digital age. It confirms that investing in affiliate marketing and fostering creative innovation are not just trendy ideas, but effective strategies for survival and growth. But it also highlights a crucial detail: these strategies work best when they are used to understand and engage with the specific people who make up the customer base. By focusing on the customer mix, businesses can turn digital interactions into lasting competitive advantages. The study does not claim to have solved every problem for small businesses, nor does it suggest that these methods work for every type of product in every location. In fact, the researchers noted that the study's predictive model was limited by a relatively small sample size of 128 respondents, which means the findings should be generalized with caution to broader contexts. However, for the fashion sector in tourist areas, the evidence is clear. When small businesses combine the reach of independent promoters with the spark of creative ideas, and use those to build a strong, engaged customer community, they become stronger, more resilient, and more competitive in a challenging world.