Introduction

Knowledge management orientation and marketing

An integrated model of marketing knowledge

Internal knowledge perspective

External knowledge perspective

Organizational outcomes from knowledge perspective

Discussion and implications

Future research direction

References

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop and propose an integrated model of marketing knowledge from a tacit knowledge management perspective. This paper further aims at developing a linkage between explicit knowledge perspective (internal and external marketing) and tacit knowledge orientation of an organization, leading to improved business success. Design/methodology/approach – This paper develops a conceptual model showing the integration of the internal, tacit and explicit knowledge perspectives that results in improved business success. The proposed model and associated propositions are drawn from the synthesis of relevant knowledge and marketing literature.
Findings – Five major associated propositions are offered in the paper, which inform both scholars and practitioners about what constitutes a holistic market orientation and how organizations can achieve business success by adopting both an internal and external orientation to tacit and explicit knowledge management.
Originality/value – The model makes an original contribution to theoretical and organizational marketing management knowledge. It does this by extending the conceptual and operational boundaries of existing models of internal and external marketing, aimed at helping organizations achieve competitive advantage and business success.

Introduction

Organizations develop customer-oriented strategies to achieve strategic and sustainable business success. To execute an effective customer-focused strategy, organizations need to integrate their internal and external marketing activities (Ferdous et al., 2013; Lings, 1999). An internal market orientation perspective contributes to a better understanding of an organization, promotes its services to employees and helps employees adapt to the organizational procedural requirements and changes (Gummesson, 2000). In doing so, employees of any organization are more likely to be better equipped to deal with the requirements of the external market-oriented activities (Ferdous and Polonsky, 2014; Rodrigues and Pinho, 2010). According to Kohli and Jaworski (1990), market orientation entails three key elements – intelligence generation, intelligence dissemination and intelligence responsiveness. According to them, to be market oriented, a company must generate information of the customers’ needs and wants and the factors affecting customers, disseminate or share collected information among the various departments of the company and respond to the information by designing and implementing products and services. For this purpose, Lings and Greenley (2005) provided an interchangeable view of internal marketing and suggested that this could be considered as internal market orientation, which could be parallel to external market orientation suggested by Kohli and Jaworski (1990). Thus, they suggested internal market orientation as the collection of information for the employees of the company, disseminating the collected information among the respective departments and responding to the disseminated information. Kaur et al. (2009), however, recommended that the three refined market orientation components (intelligence generation, intelligence dissemination and intelligence responsiveness), developed by Kohli et al. (1993) can be viewed as the core of the internal market orientation construct. As both internal and external market orientations involve the generation, dissemination and responsiveness of market information (Jaworski and Kohli, 1993; Slater and Narver, 1995; Lings, 2004; Greenley, 2009), the systematic processing of information about customers and competitors, including internal customers (i.e. employees), fosters a firm’s knowledge about the market (Zebal, 2018; Luca and Atuahene-Gima, 2007; Nonaka, 1994). Past studies have deemed organizational knowledge as “market information” that proceeds through a series of activities, namely, knowledge acquisition, knowledge distribution, knowledge interpretation and organizational memory (Huber, 1991; Morman and Miner, 1997). While organizations strive to be knowledgeable about their respective markets, issues arise when organizations fail to implement internal and external knowledge management processes. This paper argues that to be successful in business, organizations need to have a sound understanding of the processes involved in generating and creating accurate and actionable market knowledge drawn from both tacit and explicit knowledge perspectives.

The traditional hypothesized relationship between market orientation (MO) and firm performance has been well established and validated in the area of marketing (e.g. Jaworski and Kohli, 1993; Narver and Slater, 1990) and strategic management (e.g. Hult and Ketchen, 2001; Morgan et al., 2009). This relationship has been proved to be positive, significant, and robust (Cano et al., 2004; Ellis, 2006; Kirca et al., 2005). In explaining this phenomenon, scholars are motivated to explore how firms possess MO and deploy this market-based asset to develop and sustain competitive advantages (Kirca et al., 2005). Then the market orientation-firm performance linkage has been unpacked and explored by various studies searching for various mediating factors connecting MO and firm performance. For example, organizational innovativeness and learning orientation are mediating factors that have been explored by scholars from the innovation and learning-based perspective (e.g. Baker and Sinkula, 1999; Deshpandé and Farley, 2004; Han et al., 1998; Keskin, 2006). Other explored mediating factors are branding orientation (O’Cass and Voola, 2011), product advantage (Langerak et al., 2004), and new products and related marketing programs creativity (Im and Workman, 2004). Influenced by the MO trend in the 1990s, management accounting research has experienced a boom in an interest in market-oriented management accounting (Helgesen, 2007). This signifies the potential use of management accounting system (MAS) information in the marketoriented setting. The path from the use of MAS to firm performance was validated in some studies (e.g. Agbejule, 2005; Chia, 1995). Specifically, the connection between MO and the use of MAS, via different management accounting techniques, was also examined by some scholars in the field of strategic management accounting (SMA) (Bromwich, 1990; Cadez and Guilding, 2008, 2012). Guilding and McManus (2002) revealed that MO has a positive effect on the use of these following management accounting techniques: customer accounting, customer segment profitability analysis, and valuation of customers or customer groups as assets. However, the review of management accounting literature has found little empirical evidence to support the path from MO to firm performance. The exceptional study by Cadez and Guilding (2008) sought to test the mediating effect of SMA techniques on the relationship between MO and firm performance in Slovenian companies. However, they found a non-significant relationship between MO and the use of SMA. Whether the use of management accounting information, via the design of MAS in terms of broad scope, timeliness, aggregation, integration (Chenhall and Morris, 1986), connects MO to firm performance remains unanswered in emerging markets (Nguyen and Doan, 2016). This question is significant because MO-MAS-performance link can provide managers of market-oriented firms with implications on how to develop and sustain competitive advantages via different dimensions of MAS use.

Abstract

This study examined the innovation that leads to a competitive advantage in the frozen food business in the context of small-sized and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The research process consisted of three parts: 1) a literature study; 2) an empirical research study using questionnaires as a data collection tool; and 3) an analysis and conclusion of the research results using exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and structural equation modelling (SEM). The findings showed that innovation enhanced the advantages in competition via external factors. These external factors were divided into two groups: micro-oriented factors and macro-oriented factors. The external factors at the micro level had more influence on the innovation development of the frozen food businesses than those at the macro level. The results showed that entrepreneurs, especially SME entrepreneurs, need to adapt and readily prepare themselves to face upcoming economic changes, which are about to occur not only at the global level but also at the regional and the country levels. In addition to the internal contexts within the organization, external factors are also important, especially those that will lead to the development of innovation.

Introduction

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play an important role in the economic and social development of a country. The roles of SMEs are reflected in the creation of jobs and income, and improved trade balance and are the main mechanisms in revitalizing and enhancing national economic advancement via income generation and job creation. In addition, SMEs are the starting point of development into an industry. Most large companies at present developed from SMEs (Oduntan, 2014, Robu, 2013). SMEs are a major type of company, accounting for 95–99 percent of all businesses, with additional job creation totalling more than 60–70 percent (The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2016). In 2015 in Asia, SMEs accounted for 96 percent of the total enterprises and created more than 50–85 percent of the total employment positions within each Asian country.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to learn how strategic hybrid orientation – constructed from brand and market orientations – is related to the brand awareness, brand credibility, and financial performance of business-to-business (B2B) small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Design/methodology/approach – The questionnaire was used in a survey to collect data from 250 Finnish B2B SMEs. The sampled firms were categorized into four clusters according to a two-by-two matrix, and their relationships with the brand performance outcomes were examined using one-way ANOVA and multiple regression. Findings – The results indicate that strategic hybrid orientation is positively related to all three dimensions of brand performance, showing that two dissimilar orientations can complement each other in improving brand performance outcomes. However, the strength of complementary interaction seems to vary depending on the degree to which brand- and market-oriented attributes dominate in a firm’s strategy. Originality/value – This is one of the first studies to provide empirical evidence to support the concept of strategic hybrid orientation for branding in B2B SMEs. This study aims to contribute to existing research on SME branding by capitalizing on B2B branding and strategic management literatures.

Introduction

Brand building is one of the key objectives of marketing strategy. Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that are actively involved in strengthening their brand have a significant performance advantage over their competitors (e.g. Agostini et al., 2015; Berthon et al., 2008; Odoom, 2016; Selase Asamoah, 2014). Similarly, Hirvonen et al. (2016) demonstrated that business-to-business (B2B) SMEs have achieved high business growth with the help of their strong brand. Particularly in B2B markets, the stronger brand produces more trust and a close relationship with customers and other stakeholders (Leek and Christodoulides, 2011). While the importance and process of brand building in SMEs have been emphasized in the literature (e.g. Khan and Ede, 2009; Spence and Essoussi, 2010; Krake, 2005), it has received far less attention in the context of B2B markets (Glynn, 2012; Seyedghorban et al., 2016; Hirvonen et al., 2016). According to Hakala (2011, p. 200), “strategic orientations are viewed as principles that direct and influence the activities of a firm and generate the behaviours intended to ensure the viability and performance of the firm.” And consequently, various firm performance measures show improvement when relevant strategic orientation is devised in SMEs (Weinzimmer et al., 2013; Batra et al., 2015; Pérez‐Luño et al., 2016; Hirvonen and Laukkanen, 2014; Dutot and Bergeron, 2016). Moreover, a number of studies have shown that often two or more relevant strategic orientations can have a combined effect on SME’s performance (e.g. Li et al., 2008; Baker and Sinkula, 2009), including its brand performance (Laukkanen et al., 2013, 2016). The concept of developing two or more strategic orientations for firm performance is one of the widely researched topics in the strategic management literature (Hakala, 2011), but this approach for brand performance in B2B SMEs has caught scholars’ attention quite recently (Reijonen et al., 2015). There is research suggesting that brand and market orientations are independently positively related to B2B brand performance (e.g. Lee et al., 2008; Baumgarth and Schmidt, 2010), but the research does not tell how they influence it collectively. Urde et al. (2013) provided a theoretical framework for examining the synergic interaction between brand and market orientations in relation to brand performance. They proposed that instead of seeing brand and market orientations as substitutes, it is possible to combine these two to create a unified orientation in hybrid form: a strategic hybrid orientation. Hence, the strategic hybrid orientation has the characteristics of both brand and market orientations.

Abstract

This study employs resource advantage theory to identify how beef cattle value chain actors’ resources are translated into the positional advantage and how that then affects their financial performance in an emerging country context. The study tested was designed to understand if: (1) the resources of beef cattle value chain actors are positively related to positional advantage; and (2) positional advantage is positively related to the financial performance of the actors within the value chain. The unit of analysis in this study is a single beef cattle value chain. One hundred and ninety value chain actors were interviewed and the findings appear to indicate that chain actors’ resources are an antecedent to positional advantage in the marketplace and that this market advantage is an antecedent to the superior financial performance of beef cattle value chain.

Introduction

Positional advantage is gained by exploiting resources and capabilities to create superior performance (Day & Wensley, 1988). Positional advantage mediates the affiliation between competitive advantage and venture performance (Martin, Javalgi, & Cavusgil, 2016); and between market orientation and new product performance (Hao, Guo, Wang, & Saran, 2014). The construct of positional advantage, gained by a superior market orientation, and the capacity to learn about, innovate and exploit entrepreneurial opportunities positively affects business performance (Hult & Ketchen, 2001; Hunt & Lambe, 2000; Micheels & Gow, 2012). Research on positional advantage in agribusinesses in transitional nations and emerging economies is scant (Micheels & Gow, 2012). Ellis (2005) identified this research gap when he suggested that it would be useful to conduct market orientation and positional advantage studies in transitional developing countries,1 where firms engage in marketing research to offer better prices, delivery times, and customer services compared to rivals to achieve the better performance in the marketplace. Further, Bathgate, Omar, Nwankwo, and Zhang (2006) and Sheth (2011) have questioned the application of the market orientation concept in transitional and developing economies. Notwithstanding, a substantial body of research reveals the relationship between resource, positional advantage and business performance in agricultural production (Grunert et al., 2005; Johnson, Dibrell, & Hansen, 2009; Ross & Westgren, 2009), but there has been a lack of empirical application of resource advantage theory in agribusiness research.

The number of farmers’ markets has been growing across Canada in the past decade (Dukeshire et al. 2014). A recent study of consumers at farmers’ markets in Toronto, Ontario, found that consumers use farmers’ markets not only to fulfil specific grocery needs but also to support local agricultural firms (Dodds et al. 2013). Hence, sales in Ontario farmers’ markets by primary producers were estimated to be between $385 million and $577 million annually in 2010, up from an estimated $73 million in 1999 (Cummings et al. 1999; Regional Analytics and Planscape 2011). Innovative and entrepreneurial agricultural firms may aspire to improve performance by marketing their production in a manner that takes advantage of these trends. For example, farms in Ontario market their production direct to consumers through not only farmers’ markets but also on-farm markets and roadside stands, community-supported agriculture and boxing schemes, and on- and off-farm events. It is estimated that these additional outlets account for 25% of direct sales while farmers’ markets account for 75% (Schumilas 2010). Given the increased use of direct and alternative marketing channels in Ontario, a greater understanding of the factors that drive current and expected success within these alternative marketing channels seems warranted. The move to direct and alternative markets may signal that firms are not satisfied with current levels of performance achieved through more traditional channels and are therefore searching for other means to improve performance (Levinthal and March 1993; Mount 2012). In the search for new profit opportunities, firms may modify product offerings or production practices to differentiate their production from that of other firms. For smaller firms, innovations in how the product is marketed may be more scaleappropriate and more likely to lead to improved performance (Moser et al. 2011). However, as the number of farmers’ markets has increased (Dukeshire et al. 2014) along with the number of farms selling a portion of their production through farmers markets (Uematsu and Mishra 2011), these farm businesses need to further differentiate themselves from competition for continued success. In this sense, farm-based businesses who have moved into direct and alternative marketing channels may now face greater levels of competition compared to early adopters within these channels. This would suggest that the resources and capabilities that have been important in determining success in other small businesses may now be important in determining success of farm-based direct marketing ventures. However, as these farm businesses often start out as traditional farms, the level of human and relational capital that has been invested in developing resources to identify new opportunities in product or market spaces may be rather limited. As these markets become increasingly competitive, firms that are more quickly able to identify and respond to market needs may have improved performance outcomes.

In recent decades, an increasing number of scholars and practitioners have focused on the concept of market orientation (MO) and its effect to firm performance (Harris & Ogbonna, 2001; Uncles, 2011). At the firm level, relevant literature has primarily addressed the contribution of MO with regard to firm value and its economic effects (Matanda & Ndubisi, 2009). Although adopted in various approaches of theory, methodology, and analysis, previous studies have elucidated specific market behaviors to improve the effectiveness of market responses (Chen, Li, & Evans, 2012; Kaynak & Kara, 2004). The body of extant research on MO valuation has confirmed that a relationship exists between MO and certain aspects of firm value (Chad, 2013; Matanda & Ndubisi, 2009). In current dynamic and customer-driven environments, MObased value co-creation is particularly crucial (Hsieh, Chiu, & Hsu, 2008), where MO involves observing factors that are exogenous to individual firms, and the value of implementing an MO business model can extend to inter-firm relationships (Elg, 2007). In MObased value co-creation, strong interactive or collaborative relationships among firms facilitate the creation of value. To achieve value co-creation, customer feedback must be encouraged, such as preferences and opinions about products and services (Day & Bens, 2005). These conditions explain why implementing e-marketing as an extension of transaction marketing actually fosters the value co-creation. E-marketing adoption shapes how the generation of relational rents are maintained and developed, and promotes information exchange between sellers and customers. Furthermore, e-marketing confers a competitive advantage to the firms involved (Bianchi & Mathews, 2016; Brodie, Winklhofer, Coviello, & Johnston, 2007; Trainor, Rapp, Beitelspacher, & Schillewaert, 2011). Despite the critical role of the relevant parties, and the necessity to study them to show the relevance of marketing management, currently very few studies have examined how the adoption of e-marketing can facilitate the value co-creation and provision of benefits to each of the involved parties. Although business managers and researchers continue to question the value of integrated MO (Nasution & Mavondo, 2008), integrated MO has not yet been examined in the emergent research on e-marketing adoption. Previous studies have attempted to identify integrated MO as being crucial to innovation and customer value (Nasution, Mavondo, Matanda, & Ndubisi, 2011). This study, however, focuses on e-marketing adoption in terms of integrated MO, which understands both expressed and latent customer needs or delivers superior value to customers. Based on these considerations, this study examines the chain of market orientation to value co-creation, where the integrated MO of the seller encourages customers to use e-marketing in terms of co-creating value for customers and sellers. First, the study identifies how integrated MO influences e-marketing adoption, and identifies an approach to implementing e-marketing with customers to improve the benefits of selling and co-create value. Second, it assesses the effect of governance mechanisms on increasing value co-creation. Empirical validation for the proposed framework (Fig. 1) is provided based on data on international tourist hotels in Taiwan. The rest of this study proceeds as follows. The next section presents the background literature on relational view, e-marketing, market orientation, and value co-creation, and develops the research hypotheses. The subsequent section presents an empirical study testing the hypotheses. The final section discusses the findings, theoretical and managerial implications.

People worldwide enjoy eating out, regardless of whether it is with friends or family members (Rhee et al., 2016). Over the years, the restaurant industry has grown because of the changings in our ways of lives. Modern lifestyle which leaves no time to cook leads to booming of this industry (Andaleeb and Conway, 2006). Restaurant industry is highly competitive and a key objective of a successful business is satisfying consumers’ needs and ensuring their positive post-purchase behavior. Numerous various factors limit the ability of a restaurant to provide proper quality services; namely business size, employees’ attitudes, intangibility of service, intense competition, volatile demand, and the choice amongst wide range of beverage and food products offered (Kukanja et al., 2016). Therefore, a restaurant’s performance is very important for its survival. For this reason, a wide range of studies have been undertaken in the field of restaurant’s performance and service quality (e.g., Andaleeb and Conway, 2006; Chow et al., 2007; Gupta et al., 2007; Namkung and Jang, 2008; Ha and Jang, 2010; Chang et al., 2010; Min and Min, 2011; Min and Min, 2013; Chang, 2013; Lee, 2015; Kim et al., 2016; Kukanja et al., 2016). In general, organizational performance has been an attractive research topic in different sectors for many years (Carroll et al., 2011). However, there is a lack of complete consensus among experts about the dimensions and indicators of organizational performance. Undoubtedly, human resources are the greatest assets in service organizations (Ramadhan, 2015). Improving and optimizing human resources has always been a motive for profit and non-profit organizations. According to experts on management, performance evaluation is a suitable strategy for improving human resources.

فروشندگان نقش محوری را در ترویج محصولات جدید بازی می کنند. بنابراین، مدیران باید از ساز و کارهای کنترل (یعنی کنترل مبتنی بر خروجی، کنترل مبتنی بر رفتار، و یا کنترل مبتنی بر دانش) که قادرند عملکرد فروش محصولات جدید را توسط فروشندگان شان بهبود بخشند آگاه باشند. افزون بر این، مدیران قادر به کمک به فروشندگان در انجام بهتر امور با برخورداری از یک جهت گیری بازار قوی نیز می باشند. ادبیات مربوط به اثرات مکانیسم های کنترل مدیریت فروش متناقض بوده و تا حال جهت گیری بازار در یک چارچوب کنترل مدیریت فروش گنجانیده نشده است.

مطالعه حاضر 315 فروشنده تایوانی شرکت های الکترونیکی بازرگانی عمومی را با هدف کمک به ادبیات مدیریت فروش مورد پیمایش قرار داده است. نتایج نشان می دهند که کنترل های مدیریت فروش به صورت مستقیم می توانند بر نوآوری فروشندگان تاثیر بگذارند که این امر نیز به نوبه خود بر عملکرد فروش محصول جدید تاثیر می گذارد. با این حال، کنترل های مدیریت فروش نمی توانند به طور مستقیم بر عملکرد تاثیر بگذارند. افژون بر این، جهت گیری بازار می تواند به صورت مثبتی رابطه بین نوآوری فروشندگان و عملکرد فروش محصول جدید را تعدیل نماید.

مقاله سال 2016

Understanding the determinants of business performance is a key interest of business researchers and practitioners. Most researchers in the fields of industrial organization, strategic management, and marketing examine the sources of performance differences among firms or business units. Previous studies suggest that external and internal factors influence firms’ performance differences. For example, external factors include industry structure (e.g., Porter, 1980) and country characteristics (e.g., Makino, Isobe, & Chan, 2004). Internal factors include firm resources (e.g., Barney, 1986, 1991), market orientation (e.g., Kohli & Jaworski, 1990; Narver & Slater, 1990), marketing capabilities (e.g., Morgan, Vorhies, & Mason, 2009), and dynamic capabilities (e.g., Teece, 2007; Teece, Pisano, & Shuen, 1997).

Previous empirical studies examine the question of principal sources of performance using secondary or primary survey data. Studies relying on secondary data (e.g., Fukui & Ushijima, 2011; Makino et al., 2004; Mauri & Michaels, 1998; McGahan & Porter, 1997, 2002; Roquebert, Phillips, & Westfall, 1996; Rumelt, 1991) decompose the variance in performance into components associated with external and internal factors. The findings indicate that internal factors (e.g., corporate and business effects) are more important than external factors (e.g., industry effects) in explaining the variance in performance. At the same time, because these studies rely on secondary data, detailed information on internal factors, let alone external factors, are not available (Galbreath & Galvin, 2008).

Other studies using primary survey data more specifically capture the sources of performance. For example, Spanos and Lioukas (2001) explore the impacts of Porter’s (1980) five forces of industry structure (competitive rivalry, barriers to entry, threat of substitutes, power of buyers, and power of suppliers) and firm assets on market performance and profitability. Morgan et al. (2009) examine the impacts of market orientation and marketing capabilities on subjective and objective performance measures. These studies attempt to provide information as to which specific industry forces or firm resources and capabilities are the primary determinants of performance. However, the results of empirical studies using survey data are often mixed. Moreover, because most studies only use data from a single year, the degree to which these impacts are attributable to stable effects is unclear.

مقاله سال 2016

Marketing plays a significant role in determining the strategic orientation and performance outcomes of the firm (Rust, Ambler, Carpenter, Kumar, & Srivastava, 2004; Srivastava & Reibstein, 2005). Capabilities in acquiring and transforming tangible and intangible resources are considered as an important determinant of value creation and competitive advantage (Hunt & Morgan, 1995; Hunt & Morgan, 2005; Morgan, 2012; Wang, Hu, & Hu, 2013; Kozlenkova, Samaha, & Palmatier, 2014). In increasingly fragmented and dynamic markets (Cavusgil, Seggie, & Talay, 2007), dynamic capabilities of utilising market knowledge become crucial to technological innovation (Bruni & Verona, 2009). Thus, dynamic marketing capabilities are defined in terms of absorptive capacity and knowledge management (Barrales-Molina, MartínezLópez, & Gázquez-Abad, 2014). Given the continuing debate on marketing capabilities and performance (Rust et al., 2004; Srivastava & Reibstein, 2005; Vorhies & Morgan, 2005; Webster, Malter, & Ganesan, 2005), a more fine-grained research is called for on both marketing and organisational antecedents of firm performance and the causal mechanisms by which competitive advantage is generated.

This paper provides three main contributions to marketing research. The first contribution lies in explaining the conditions under which marketing and the marketing department contribute to competitive advantage. While the research on dynamic marketing capabilities is fostered by the advancement of relationship marketing and servicedominant logic, paradoxically practitioners are experiencing a loss of relevance and influence of the marketing department within the firm (Verhoef & Leeflang, 2009; Verhoef et al., 2011), with marketing departments being in jeopardy (Webster, 1992; Homburg, Workman, & Krohmer, 1999; Webster et al., 2005; O’Sullivan & Abela, 2007) and chief marketing officers (CMOs) fearing for job loss (Lee, 2012). Therefore, the research on marketing capabilities and performance shows an apparent tension between a paradigm shift towards a service-dominant logic and the loss of importance of the marketing department with the firm. The premise of this paper is that the tension can be reconciled by reconsidering the general propositions of resource-advantage (hereafter R-A) theory developed by Hunt and Morgan (1995, 1996, 1997) and Hunt (1997a, 1997b).

The second contribution consists in the creation of a new analytical framework that extend R-A theory by making use of Verhoef and Leeflang’s (2009) work (hereafter VL). Although VL’s model empirically investigating the changing role of the marketing department within firms is not underlined by any specific marketing theory, their work includes comprehensive indicators to measure intangible resources and marketing capabilities. Utilising these indicators, we focus on the moderation of the capabilities–performance relationship by market orientation, strategic orientation and organisational power. Such logic of analysis is implicit in the original formulation of R-A theory but has never been articulated explicitly and tested empirically.

مقاله سال 2016

If firms with superior market knowledge perform better, what is a key performance indicator of the firms’ being more knowledgeable in the most useful fashion? Many answers exist to this question. However, key performance indicators must explain the source of knowledge, identify the use of knowledge, and accommodate the context specific to the firm. Considering these criteria, which construct should one use as a key indicator to define the firms’ smartness? An even bigger dilemma arises when two similar theories collide on the issue.

Absorptive capacity (ACAP) is a central construct in several research areas in organizational studies. Researchers propose several conceptual models of ACAP(Camison & Fores, 2010; Cohen & Levinthal, 1990). Zahra and George (2002) reformulate a term “ACAP” and further broaden the definition to be a set of organizational routines and strategic processes by which firms acquire, assimilate, transform, and apply knowledge to gain and sustain competitive advantage. Researchers widely use these four dimensions of ACAP to empirically test ACAP’s in- fluences on a variety of product and firm performance outcomes (Atuahene-Gima, 1992; Jansen, Van den Bosch, & Volberda, 2005; Lichtenthaler, 2009). ACAP is evidently an indicator of firm performance and seems to fit the criteria as mentioned above, hence can one conclude that a firm with higher ACAP will be smarter than the others?Unfortunately, the answer remains unclear. Most of the past ACAP literature does not pay much attention to the importance of context specific effects of ACAP. In particular, research studies mainly focus on R&D context rather than marketing context when studying ACAP. Besides technological knowledge, market knowledge—customer and competitor intelligence—is a critical component of a firm’s ACAP in a free market economy since a firm’s central principle and driving force is a competition (or, in other words, the intensity of the rivalry between sellers for the demand of buyers or customers; Dickson, 1992).

Thus, firms that are most alert to learn directly from competitors’ moves and strive hardest in their search for more efficient and effective ways to serve their customers’ needs will be the most competitive in the market (Dickson, 1992). Significantly, firms with customer and competitor intelligence ACAP can apply and commercialize opportunities for the use of technological knowledge in creating new products, improving quality, or developing process innovation (Teece, 2007; Van den Bosch, Volberda, & de Boer, 1999).