Literature Review on the Business Adoption of the Marketing Concept.

Authors Avatar

Literature Review on the Business Adoption of the Marketing Concept

Businesses started to adopt the marketing concept at the end of the 1960’s however to achieve real success companies must go further than mere customer satisfaction they must do it better than the competition.  The marketing concept has advanced since its early beginning and this review examines three papers which look at some of the effects of companies that have adopted the marketing concept The papers although not directly related to one another all look at different effects of business’s adopting a marketing approach. These papers I have studied are Narver and Slater (1990) `The effect of a Market Orientation on Business Profitability`, Brodie (1997) `Towards a Paradigm Shift in Marketing `and finally Harris and Obdgona (2000) `the response of front line employees to market orientated culture change`.

In 1990 Narver and Slater launched an exploratory study to investigate whether Market Orientation did actually have an effect on business profitability. Marketing practitioners and academics had always assumed there was a relationship to higher profits but no research had ever been done.  The research involved a survey involving 140 Sustainable business units in a western forest corporation made up of 2 types of businesses Commodity businesses, non-commodity businesses. They related the firm’s profitability in relation to competitors over the last year against their three component measure of Market Orientation: customer orientation, competitor orientation and the degree of interfunctional coordination.

In 1997 a study led by Brodie looked at companies to see if their had been a paradigm shift within the marketing world from a transactional approach to a relational approach. He also wanted to find out if some forms of marketing are more apparent in certain firms and that if more than one type of marketing could take place within a firm and if some types suit others better. His study wanted to combine European and North American research methods therefore the study involved both qualitative and quantitative research as well as informal and formal methods of research. The study is based on secondary research of a case database, a series of informal interviews and a questionnaire. The questionnaire involved participants to comment on a five-point scale to the certain extent that their firm carries out a particular marketing measure.

The article by Obdgona and Harris is an extension of previous research undertook on how employees deal with market orientation within the workplace. Unlike previous studies they want to find out what shop floor staff and sales staff how they react to market orientation not just the managers. They investigate the issue by looking at two big UK companies a leading clothing retailer and a leading food retailer. They used 3 forms of research to carry out their investigation their first method was interviews with the staff, this was then followed by observation of the staff and lastly document searching.

Join now!

Although Narver and Slater’s work didn’t show us anything new, it did cement the view that Market Orientation does effect profitability, but  it showed the level of profitability depends on the type of business. Commodity businesses those that supply simple generic products have a U-shaped market orientation and profit relationship. This should alert commodity business managers if their firm is in the middle of adopting marketing orientation they should adopt an all or nothing approach with regards to market orientation. In other words if they don’t want to invest properly don’t invest at all, but if you want high ...

This is a preview of the whole essay