Identifying and Analyzing Factors Affecting the Entrepreneurial Marketing in Agricultural Cooperatives in Mazandaran Province

The complex changes and rapid developments of the last few decades have led developed and developing countries to consider cooperatives as a basis for achieving development goals, including economic development. The results indicate that many factors strengthen cooperatives, among which many researchers have a special emphasis on entrepreneurial marketing and consider it as one of the most important factors determining the survival of cooperatives, so the goal the present study identifies and analyzes the factors affecting the entrepreneurial marketing of agricultural cooperatives in Mazandaran province. Therefore, this research is applied in terms of purpose and descriptive-survey in terms of implementation method and is of purposeful type, which has been done by mixed exploratory method. In the qualitative stage, the research team consists of 10 university experts who have been selected by purposeful method and snowball technique. In the quantitative stage, the statistical population included 290 managers of agricultural cooperatives. The sample size was determined to be 165 according to Krejcie and Morgan table and simple random sampling method was used for sampling. The content analysis method was used to identify the factors and the structural equation method with Smart PLS software was used to analyze the relationships. The results showed that the factors affecting the entrepreneurial marketing of agricultural cooperatives include contextual, causal and environmental factors. Also, the analysis of structural equations showed that underlying factors (0.344), causal (0.503) and environmental factors (0.258) have a positive and significant effect on entrepreneurial marketing.