Abstract
M.Comm. (Marketing Management)
In recent years there has been renewed interest from academics and practitioners regarding
the marketing concept and marketing orientation. With the emphasis that is placed on the
importance of marketing orientation, one would expect the existence of a clear description
of the concept, as well as many theories and measurement instruments, together with
related empirical findings regarding the concept of marketing orientation. However, there
are few valid theories or models of measurement to conceptualize and evaluate marketing
orientation. The result is that any organisation wishing to implement a marketing
orientation has no specific guidelines on what marketing orientation is and how to make it measurable.
The purpose of this study is to develop a reliable, valid and generally acceptable multi-item
measurement model for conceptualizing and evaluating the marketing orientation of an
individual organisation.
The measurement model was developed on the basis of the following two aspects:
1) A literature study of various secondary sources to provide a conceptual framework
of marketing orientation.
2) An exploratory research study to generate and purify all the possible dimensions
and variables of marketing orientation. The dimensions and variables were
generated from the perspective of business management. The methods used to
generate the dimensions and variables were an analysis of secondary sources, focus
group interviews with experts in the field of marketing, and a questionnaire survey
among managers of various profit-oriented organisations in the PWV area.
In the exploratory study, 15 provisional dimensions and 304 variables of marketing
orientation were generated. The variables represent the potential item pool for the
composition of the measurement instrument. Although much insight and ideas were
evident in the exploratory study, an attempt was made to summarize the information in the most important dimensions, which also have the most potential for stimulating further research.