Potential Development of Community Enterprises’s Entrepreneurs (Quadrant D) of Pattani Province

Abstract

Developing potential of OTOP entrepreneurs (Quadrant D) to build a career, distributing income to the community leading to poverty alleviation. Therefore research was conducted with objective to analyze the potentiality of the entrepreneurs, products’ quality, consumers’ behavior and to study the guideline for potential development of OTOP entrepreneurs in group D. It was mixed methods research. The qualitative data analysis by using in-depth interviews, SWOT analysis, Thai community product Standard test and consumers’ behavior analysis were used. The quantitative data analysis by using Questionnaire of sales record form with statistics; percentage, mean and one-way ANOVA were used. The informants were OTOP entrepreneurs in Group D selected by specific informants. There were the group leaders of 60 groups and the group members with the top three to five of the longest working experience total 260 people. Found that 1) the entrepreneurs understand the uniqueness of Muslim, therefore they can apply the products according to the local identity but they still lack of the knowledge about the processing process and products’ quality does not up to standard. On the contrary, the consumers prefer to buy products with modern designs, variety, beauty uniqueness, and affordable prices. 2) The guideline for developing the entrepreneurs’ potentiality consists of 3 aspects; The marketing aspect which has the highest average on the online marketing and marketing communications, followed by the production process in product prototyping/modern product design, and product quality on the preparation for the testing of Thai community product standard respectively. Regarding classification by product type, it was found that there were differences in developing guideline, especially a group of food product shows demand of development of producting process (sig=0.023) and marketing (sig =0.000) which is less than other products with statistical significance at 0.05 level.  The research concluded that the guidelines for developing entrepreneurial potential based on the main principle was to use marketing strategy to lead production and produce quality products with the modern knowledge and combination of Thai-Muslim identity. This will enable OTOP operators of quadrant D to be able to upgrade to a higher level.