Exploring female entrepreneurs’ marketing decisions with a heuristics and biases approach

Purpose This study furthers the body of knowledge on entrepreneurial decision-making, entrepreneurial marketing and female entrepreneurs by exploring practical implications of heuristics and biases in female entrepreneurs’ marketing decisions. Heuristics and biases influence many entrepreneurial decisions. Moreover, some of the most important entrepreneurial decisions are marketing-related. Given that the entrepreneurial marketing behavior emanates from entrepreneurial thinking and decision-making, one may conclude that female entrepreneurs’ marketing decisions are susceptible to heuristics and biases. This paper aims to explore the outcomes of heuristics and biases in entrepreneurial marketing decisions. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected by conducting semi-structured interviews with 19 Iranian female biotech entrepreneurs and analyzed by thematic analysis. Findings The findings indicate that introducing pioneering products to the market, overestimating product’s market appeal, unprepared entry, underestimating the competition, overcoming entry impediments, entry postponement, growth, success in incremental innovation and failure in radical innovation are the main outcomes of the identified heuristics and biases in the female entrepreneurs’ marketing decisions. Practical implications This paper has some precious practical implications for marketers as well as female entrepreneurs running small businesses. Generally speaking, reducing the negative impacts of the identified heuristics and biases of this study while enhancing their positive effects will increase the chances of female entrepreneurs to compete and succeed in tumultuous markets. Furthermore, our most important managerial implication is regarding overconfidence, which was very common in the female entrepreneurs’ marketing decisions by having various positive and negative outcomes. Thus, female entrepreneurs should be careful of this fateful bias in their decisions by knowing the most common signs of overconfidence. Originality/value This paper is unique because of not only identifying the main heuristics and biases but also their major outcomes in entrepreneurs’ major marketing decisions. Moreover, this paper is a pioneer in exploring heuristics and biases in female entrepreneurs’ decisions.