The private sector, dominated by small and medium enterprises (SME), has been rapidly developing in Poland. Small and medium enterprises are defined as economic entities hiring not more than 250 employees and have turnovers lower than 50 million euros per year. The functioning of small and medium enterprises supports a decrease in unemployment, contributes to introduction of innovative operations and products as well as significantly influences GDP generation. The SME sector faces many barriers limiting their development. They include mainly social, financial and law barriers. Operations of the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development, Academic Business Incubators and other entities support small entrepreneurship. Recently, marketing in small and medium enterprises has particularly influenced their survival. A marketing programme consists of four elements a product, price, distribution, and promotion and is described as the marketing mix. In the paper, results of research in randomly selected enterprises of the SME sector are presented. The aim of the research was to diagnose a range of marketing operations’ use in these companies. The conducted research displays that marketing activity is used mainly for promotion in the investigated enterprises and to a small extent for managing a product’s portfolio in a firm.
