Do Marketing Objectives Affect Marketing Efficiency? A Case Study of Dates Marketing in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Saudi Arabia has dates as the most important agriculture crop, from both production and area harvested sides, its area was 155 thousand hectares and production was 991 thousand tons in 2010. Even that, the post production stage for dates did not developed to offer the efficient marketing services. Technical and cost efficiency estimation of date marketing became a necessary step to develop date marketing services. This study explores the relationship between, date marketing efficiencies, technical (TE) and cost (CE), and date marketing objectives, with special reference to date marketing scales (Y), date marketing margin (MM), and date marketing classical efficiency as ratio between date marketing margins to date marketing costs (MM/MC). Results of this case study indicated that technical efficiency, based on dates marketing scale objective, gets the highest value at Madena (0.80) while lowest was at Al-Hassa (0.68). While cost efficiency did not change much as it was 0.23 at Al-Hassa and 0.20 at the other 3 provinces. While for date marketing margin objective, the technical and cost efficiencies are the same, 0.7 and 0.2, respectively for all the studied four provinces. The ratio of market margin to marketing costs (MM/MC), as an objective, has its impact on technical efficiency for date marketing was about 0.7, for 3 provinces except at Riyadh, it was 0.6. The dates marketing cost efficiencies for all 4 provinces have the same value of 0.2.

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