Execution Deficit or Structural Mismatch? a Systematic Review of Social Media Marketing (in)Effectiveness Among MSMEs Selling High Consideration Products

Abstract

Social media marketing (SMM) is widely promoted as a low-cost route to market for micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), and a large empirical literature has examined whether it improves their performance. The results are uneven: some MSMEs grow rapidly through social platforms, while others invest for years with little return. The literature usually attributes such shortfalls to deficits on the owner's side, for example limited skills, budget, time, or organizational capability. This explanation implicitly assumes that social media works in the same way for every product. Consumer-behavior research, however, has long shown that purchase decisions differ in how much search, comparison, and verification they require. What remains unclear is whether the SMM–MSME literature has considered that some failures may reflect a structural mismatch between social media affordances and the demands of high-consideration purchasing, rather than a capability deficit; no prior review has coded product consideration as an explicit analytical variable. This systematic literature review therefore examines how the literature frames SMM (in)effectiveness, assesses how much evidence speaks directly to product–channel constraints, and develops a framework that distinguishes execution deficit from structural mismatch. Following PRISMA 2020 guidance, two Scopus search waves covering 2020–2026 yielded 739 records. After journal-quality screening (applied to the first wave), deduplication, and eligibility screening, we retained 210 studies and coded them across Adoption, Effectiveness, and Fit layers. Of the 189 studies whose explanatory framing could be assessed, 108 (57.1%) explain SMM outcomes through firm-side capabilities, resources, or readiness, 55 (29.1%) treat SMM as uniformly effective, only 19 (10.1%) rely on channel, sector, or institutional conditions, and 7 (3.7%) combine both. Only two of the 210 studies (0.95%) provide direct evidence of a product–channel constraint in a high-consideration context, and neither formally compares high- and low-consideration products. Integrating consumer decision-making theory, media affordance theory, and the strategic-fit perspective, the review proposes a two-factor framework (execution capability × product–channel fit) and four testable propositions. The contribution is not another capability factor but the repositioning of product consideration as a boundary condition that governs when SMM capability converts into market outcomes. For MSME support programs, the framework implies screening for product–channel fit before prescribing uniform social media training.