Market and Customer Knowledge and the Role of Value in Firm Performance

Market and Customer Knowledge and the Role of Value in Firm Performance provides a multi-tiered look at how and when market orientation impacts seller performance. While market orientation is generally accepted as a key factor in above-average firm or SBU performance, the published literature has numerous examples of inconsistent research results.In the first essay, I look narrowly at the impact of market orientation on seller performance and find that market orientation impacts performance through its role in helping firms create offerings that customers value. Value partially mediates the market-orientation-to-performance relationship. Besides excluding value as a potential mediator, researchers have been using the terms and scales for market orientation and customer orientation virtually interchangeably.In the second essay, I attempt to resolve what turns out to be more than a semantic issue by developing two separate scales, for market orientation and customer orientation. The two scales are not interchangeable and have different roles in predicting firm performance. Through these two essays, I offer a more complete model of how and when knowing about a firms market and/or customers will lead to above-average performance.