The Effects of Marketing Strategies on Marketing Performance of Apparel and Construction Companies in Recession Conditions

Today's business environment is very complex and dynamic, and this will be even more complicated when the economic downturn is also affecting the economic conditions of the country and the manufacturing and service sectors. In such a situation where firms are also in recession, the adoption of marketing strategies as a process that allows the company to achieve the goals of increased sales and sustainable competitive advantage by focusing resources on optimal opportunities and can help companies to continually improve their performance. This process will help them  to keep pace with dynamic and competitive market conditions. Among the industries that today have such a complicated situation, are the apparel and construction industries. They are facing declining demand and need to adopt appropriate marketing strategies. Therefore, the research goals were to investigate the effects of marketing strategies on the marketing performance of apparel and construction companies and their ranking in terms of economic downturn. In order to achieve the research objective, in addition to library studies, field studies were conducted and a questionnaire with 27 questions was formulated and after verifying its content validity, it was distributed among senior managers of production, marketing and research of 9 apparel companies and 20 companies in the construction industry who were selected through purposeful judgment sampling. After data collection, the reliability of the questionnaire with Cronbach's alpha was figured higher than 0.7 and it was found acceptable scientifically. Data were analyzed by structural equation modeling. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis showed that the fitting indexes of the model were appropriate and the results of the path analysis showed that separation marketing strategy and centralized marketing strategy have a positive and significant effect on the  marketing performance of the companies, but the effect of the similar marketing strategy on the performance of the corporate market was negative. Also, the results of Friedman's test showed that segregation marketing strategy in both industries was ranked first