مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

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.