Developing a better measure of market orientation

While academics have been attempting to establish empirical support for the marketing concept, managers have been facing a complementary challenge to implement this cornerstone of marketing theory. Both groups appear to have had limited success. Part of the problem may lie in a failure to establish a generalisable model of market orientation. There is also a lack of a parsimonious measure which managers can use to pinpoint organisational short‐comings. This study addresses both those problems by replicating and extending the market orientation research of both Jaworski and Kohli and Narver and Slater using a large multi‐industry sample of New Zealand companies. The result is a parsimonious and managerially useful 20‐item scale for measuring the market orientation of New Zealand companies. It is likely this scale could be generalisable to other country‐market contexts. The findings also indicate that the successful implementation of the marketing concept should produce improved customer and organisational benefits, particularly if performance is measured in terms of improved profitability, brand awareness, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.